Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures.

Multilingual Margins

A journal of multilingualism from the periphery

Volume 2 Issue 1

EDITORS

August 2015

CHRISTOPHER STROUDUniversity of the Western Cape

South Africa

QUENTIN WILLIAMS University of the Western Cape

South Africa

ARTICLES

Editorial 2The importance of unimportant language JAN BLOMMAERT AND PIIA VARIS 4Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?: Phatic communication, the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African context FIE VELGHE

10

Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and new social structures PIIA VARIS AND JAN BLOMMAERT 31Common ground and conviviality: Indonesians doing togetherness in Japan ZANE GOEBEL

46

Between phatic communion and coping tactic. Casamançais multilingual practices TILMANN HEIL 67Conviviality and phatic communion? BEN RAMPTON 83

BOOK REVIEWSReview of Sociolinguistics and mobile communication by Ana Deumert ZANNIE BOCK

92

Review of Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow FELIX BANDA

96

GUEST EDITORSJAN BLOMMAERT

Tilburg University and Ghent University

PIIA VARIS Tilburg University

2

This is a collection of linguistic trivia, picked from the mundaneness of

everyday speech. However, as each of the papers so well documents, the trivia is far from trivial and the seemingly marginal linguistic phenomena studied here are full of significance, not least from the vantage point of the margins. The papers provide detailed analyses of how ‘small talk’ regularly contributes to the emergence of meaning and interpersonal understanding; items that get repeated across turns and speakers, for example, help interlocutors stake out joint coordinates in relation to the flow of conversation, scaffolding what a speaker may be taken to be referencing—or intending to reference—and allowing them to mutually work towards a shared stance on ‘what a word might mean’.

One's thoughts turn here to Tabouret-Keller and Le Page’s (1985) notion of focusing, the process whereby shared normative orders of language emerge out of situations of multilingual contact. Might not the small talk detailed here underlie the linguistic regimes that grow out of meetings of difference? Small talk would then be the stuff out of which meaning emerges—the reptilian stem out of which grows the cortex of propositional language.

However, these unimportant bits of language do not only transform fleeting moments of encounter into the sustained social engagement that is 'language'. In another context (Williams and Stroud, 2013), we have suggested that convivial routines such as these are the bedrock of new forms of citizenship. This is, of course, not a citizenship of nation states, but ‘citizenship’ performed through what Isin calls ‘acts of citizenship.

These are 'acts through which citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge not as beings already defined but as beings acting and reacting with others' (2008:39).

It is a citizenship of postnational affiliations, one of, in Blommaert and Varis' words, a 'community beyond Durkheimian-Parsonian imaginations of homogeneity and sharedness', forged out of 'light and flexible social bonds' (Blommaert and Varis, p. 8).

Again, the relevance for the margins is clear, especially, in a context such as the South African, where historically very different people are seeking more ethical forms of co-existence, Chipkin suggests that 'citizenship could be defined by feelings of friendship and solidarity reproduced through interactions of democratic practice' (2007). Rose speaks of 'minor practices of citizenship formation that are linked to a 'politics of cramped spaces of action of the here-and-now'' (2000: 100). The unimportant bits of language that link people across disjunctive events help create the space, out of which new possibilities for mutualities among strangers can emerge. We see examples of this in Velghe’s paper which details the important social support role that affiliative networks constructed through unimportant language fulfill in the impoverished communities of Wesbank outside of Cape Town. We see this also in Tilman’s piece on the Camancais migrants from Africa

In their introduction to this issue, Blommaert and Varis, citing Goffman, note how “many of our vital relationships are built on seemingly unimportant interactions” and go on to remark on how ‘small talk’ and restricted displays of information … secure the persistence of

Editorial

© Stroud, Williams & CMDR. 2014

Multilingual Margins 2015, 2(1):2-3

3Editorial

‘big’ social structure (p. 43). However, not only do these forms of language create, sustain and amend social structures, but they are also what translates these larger than life social dynamics into peoples’ 'vernacularized and everyday experienced reality' (Blommaert and Varis, this issue, p. 6). This is the essence of the idea of ‘linguistic citizenship, understood as the linguistic mediation of agency in cramped spaces, where larger circuits of power are mediated through linguistic engagements with the everydayness of the local (Williams and Stroud, 2013: 293). Thus, it is out of the almost imperceptible small bits of language, the repetitions of fragments across many turns, and the shifting meanings these take on as they travel across contexts and speakers, that the stuff of social life is made. And herein lies the significance of marginal and unimportant language for the multilingual margins.

REFERENCESChipkin, Ivor. 2007. Do South Africans exist?

Nationalism, democracy and the identity of the people. Johannesburg; Wits University Press.

Isin, Engin and Greg M. Nielsen (eds). 2008. Acts of citizenship, London and New York, Zed Books.

Rose, N. 2000. Governing cities, governing citizens. In Engin Isin (ed.). Democracy, Citizenship and the global city. Pp. 95-109. London: Routledge.

Le Page, Robert B. and Tabouret-Keller, Andree. 1985. Acts of Identity: creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Quentin. and Stroud, Christopher. 2013. Multilingualism in transformative spaces: contact and conviviality. Language Policy 12: 289-311.

© Stroud, Williams & CMDR. 2014

4

BANALITY AS MEANINGFUL

In a recent paper, the Australian historian, Martyn Lyons (2013),

reviews his attempts to study ‘history from below’, using what can be called grassroots writing by French and Italian soldiers of the Great War. Lyons remarks that the ‘First World War produced a flood of letter-writing by peasants whose literary capacity has often been underestimated’ (Lyons 2013: 5). In France, no less than 10,000 million postal items were dispatched during the war, huge numbers of those being letters and cards written by soldiers from the frontlines to their loved ones. Lyons comments further:

Soldiers’ letters followed standard ritualistic formulas, giving and asking for news about health, discussing letters and postcards sent and received, sending greetings to many relatives and neighbors. As a result, their writing leaves us with an overwhelming sense of banality. (Lyons 2013: 22)

Contentwise, thus, the millions of letters sent to and from the front seemed to have little to offer: frontline soldiers ‘wrote,

and expected to receive, comforting repetitions of laconic formulas, which conveyed very little of their experience’ (id.: 23). This remark by Lyons is followed by a fragment from a letter to the front, which should serve as an argument underpinning the claim about contentless communication:

Rosa Roumiguières invited her correspondent to dispense with words altogether. ‘I’d be happy with a single line, a single word’, she wrote in August 1914, ‘even with just an envelope with nothing inside, but write to me often’ (…) (ibid.)

Rosa’s invective to her frontline soldier, we would say, points to something which is rather far removed from the ‘banality’ discerned by Lyons as the reason why the mountain of frontline correspondence reveals so little of the soldiers’ (and their correspondents’) experience. On the contrary: Rosa clearly points towards the tremendous importance of communication even when such communication has little to offer in the way of content. The banality of the letters did not prevent their authors and addressees from attaching extraordinary

The importance of unimportant language

Jan BlommaertTilburg University and Ghent University

Piia VarisTilburg University

© Blommaert, Varis and CMDR. 2014


5The importance of unimportant language


importance to them—the sheer fact of writing, or better, of sending something, was enough to comfort and reassure people worried to the extreme about each other’s wellbeing. The simple act of communication itself was tremendously meaningful: it was the ‘sign of life’ that was so crucial in the social world surrounding the Great War; it forced people who otherwise were not great writers to compose tons of letters and postcards—in itself a pretty powerful revelation of the soldiers’ and their correspondents’ experience.

This special issue will engage with the paradox we have encountered here: that people often produce ‘unimportant’ language, when seen from the viewpoint of denotational and informational content, but still attach tremendous importance to such unimportant forms of communication. They invest tremendous amounts of energy in them (Lyons mentions a French soldier who wrote an average of three to four letters per day at the frontline, p. 22) and their efforts at communicating were often effective. At least, they were effective for the likes of Rosa Roumiguières; for historians many decades later, however, they often fail to live up to the promise of denotational and informational richness—they are ‘banal’ historical artifacts.

THE ISSUEErving Goffman, that great observer of the ordinary, spent a large part of his Behavior in Public Places on describing the rules of superficial engagement between people—the hardly profound kinds of social relationships he called ‘acquaintanceship’. In Goffman’s words:

Common sense designates by the phrase ‘mere acquaintance’ a relationship in which the rights of

social recognition form the principal substance of the relationship. Further, after persons have been ‘close’ it is possible for their relationship to decay, stopping only at a point where they are ‘still on talking terms’, or, after that (and with a discontinuous leap), at a point when they are ‘not talking’, in either case conferring on mere engagement practices the power of characterizing the relationship. (Goffman 1963: 114).

Particular ‘engagement practices’—let’s call them patterns of social interaction—define, in the minds of people, entire elaborate typologies of social relationships, a gradient from being ‘close’, to being ‘on speaking terms’ to ‘not talking’ anymore, with ‘acquaintanceship’ taking a position somewhere midway between deep human engagement (friendship) and no such engagement at all.

The patterns of social interaction in which ‘mere acquaintances’ engage are quite superficial: Goffman (1963: 154) describes a universe of nods, body movements, eye contact, greetings, and what he calls ‘safe supplies’, maximally shared topics of restricted importance that can keep polite conversation going for quite a while without any degree of (or necessity for) movement towards more intimate subjects. (Think of the weather, sports results, popular TV shows or current scandals as examples of such topics.) Yet Goffman insists on their extraordinary importance in US bourgeois culture: failing to sustain such low-intensity interactions or refusing such forms of engagement is seen as a very serious violation of the rules of civility, and he draws on the support of several authors of well-read etiquette books and prominent society columnists for evidence. Behavior in Public Places demonstrates, along with other things,

6 BLOMMAERT AND VARIS


how many of our vital social relationships are built on seemingly unimportant interactions, how ‘small talk’ and restricted displays of information, knowledge and wit secure the persistence of big social structures, membership of which we find extraordinarily important.

The papers in this volume follow this line of argument, namely, the vital importance of patterns of interaction often seen as unimportant. Each paper seeks to focus disciplined attention on forms of discourse that occur in minimal quantity and degree of elaboration, that nevertheless carry momentous social salience in several domains of social life. The orientation of the work reported here is functional: we address language from the perspective of its effects – ‘meaning’ of course, but typically a broad range of meanings covered by terms such as ‘social effect’. While the often emblematic or ‘phatic’ functions of such patterns of interaction do not necessarily project much in the way of denotational content, they provide rich and ordered indexicals and are, in that sense, a key form of socio-linguistic life: forms of language usage that, in themselves and because of intricate pragmatic-metapragmatic links to be described in the papers, create, sustain and amend social structures. The tremendous efforts often invested in acquiring such ‘phatic’ skills, documented in Fie Velghe’s paper in this volume, illustrate the social significance of such practices. This is micro-sociolinguistic stuff directly connecting with macro-social stuff. For the authors in this collection, this is exactly the analytical importance of unimportant language.

Let us make the latter point very clear: it is important to keep in mind that our focus is on the ways in which ‘minimal’ forms of language usage relate to large-scale social structures and developments

therein. And while a significant portion of what is discussed in the papers will be devoted to the particular linguistic-discursive forms themselves, the end point of such description contributes to insights in the nature of contemporary social organization. This specific sociolinguistic orientation sets this collection apart from the well-known tradition of work on ‘small talk’ initiated by Justine Coupland and associates (e.g. Coupland 2000). In this earlier work, much of it truly brilliant, the focus was on the interactional importance of ‘small talk’. While very often dismissed as mere introductory and concluding (‘unimportant’) aspects of talk-in-interaction, Coupland and her associates demonstrated how small talk contributed to sustained interactional engagement and, through that, to face, identity and relational concerns among speakers (e.g. Jaworski 2000). The recognition of small talk as a legitimate and relevant object of discourse analysis is due to this work; we can build on this discourse-analytic salience in our sociolinguistic approach to similar phenomena. Taking their discursive salience as a point of departure, we can look at these phenomena from the perspective of how they create a vernacularized and everyday experienced reality of ‘big’ social diacritics and dynamics.

A number of points regarding the specific orientation of papers in this collection demand further explanation. While we discuss these points, we will also have the opportunity to locate the specific contributions in this collection within the framework thus sketched.

THE ONLINE ‘PHATIC’ WORLDFirst, this collection grew out of a growing awareness of the immense frequency



of ‘phatic’ features observable in social media interaction (cf. Miller 2008; Lange 2009; Thurlow and Jaworski 2011). The Facebook ‘like’ button is probably among the world’s most frequently used signs, with several billions of instances of use every day, yet it is a typical ‘phatic’ sign, a gesture, the precise semantic direction of which is highly variable. One can ‘like’ both a relative’s birthday announcement and a very unpleasant piece of news, and the ‘like’ sign can thus effectively mean ‘dislike’ as well—it can be pragmatically deployed to signal the opposite of its conventional semantic content. That other Facebook function, identifying and requesting ‘friends’, is equally something that in effect covers a very broad and diverse range of experiential subdivisions, casting an uncomfortable light on established notions such as ‘community’ informed by Durkheimian-Parsonian imaginations of homogeneity and sharedness of membership status and features. Other current phenomena of online communication, such as ‘sharing’ and ‘retweeting’ signs and messages, also appear to operate on a pragmatic-metapragmatic level rather than on a semantic one, signaling co-presence, as well as attention and affection rather than (dis)agreement with sign contents.

The emergence and wide distribution of online and mobile technologies has shaped new lifeworlds for large numbers of people, now effectively integrated, so to speak, with ‘offline’ social life and constructing along with other forms of sociocultural diversification the ‘superdiversity’ characterizing our present social systems (e.g. Varis and Wang 2011; Blommaert and Rampton 2011). New social units have emerged—think of social media and online gaming ‘communities’ – entailing new opportunities for identity enactment and performance and driven by new

forms of online visual-literate genres and registers (see Varis 2014 for a survey). It is important to understand that such new social environments constitute novel and unprecedented socio-technologically mediated sociolinguistic environments (‘contexts’ in traditional jargon). This new online sociolinguistic environment has reshuffled the entire economy of semiotic and linguistic resources in social formations – a feature which includes not just those who have abundant access to the new technologies but also those who lack such (degrees of) access.

While much of the sociolinguistic features and impact of these innovations remains to be explored, authors in this collection will suggest that part of that newness may reside, precisely, in the abundance of ‘phatic’ patterns of interaction, combined with a mysterious sociolinguistic and discursive phenomenon commonly known as ‘virality’: the extraordinary speed and scale with which certain signs—often phatic—are spread on the internet. Virality is a communication phenomenon in which sometimes millions of people ‘share’ a sign, for reasons not located in the sign itself—‘memes’ do not mean the same thing for the people who send them around (see Varis and Blommaert in this volume). The astonishing virality of things such as Gangnam Style (initially a music video published on YouTube by the South-Korean entertainer Psy) reaching two billion views by June 2014 raises complex issues of communication, meaning and community structure for researchers; all the more interesting since there appears to be a very broad consensus over the fact that Gangnam Style is neither a musical, visual or entertainment revolution in terms of quality.

The point is that the new online world offers numerous invitations for unthinking and rethinking semiotic

8 BLOMMAERT AND VARIS


truths for researchers, and that these opportunities quickly extend to social and cultural theory: the challenges are fundamental and general, not specific and case-restricted and authors in this collection address them.

CONVIVIALITYThe recognition of the tremendous frequency of ‘phatic’ phenomena online goes hand in hand with a renewed attention for the broader and equally challenging phenomena that go under the label of ‘conviviality’ (e.g. Wessendorf 2010). Conviviality stands for low-intensity social engagement, seemingly superficial but critical for, in fact, importantly assuring social cohesion, community belonging and social comfort. We can see Goffman’s work discussed above as a study of conviviality in US bourgeois culture in many ways. Current research on superdiverse sociocultural environments, however, establishes the relevance of conviviality as a relatively unexpected but very important social structure in contexts of profound sociocultural fragmentation (cf. Blommaert 2013). The delicate display of minimal and ‘truncated’ multilingual language proficiency and discursive moves captured under Goffman’s ‘safe supplies’ actually proves to play a crucial role in sustaining a nonthreatening and homely community feeling among people who otherwise do not seem to share much. It functions as an emblematic pointer to the need and desire to get along in conditions where more profound engagement may be unwarranted, not necessary or impossible (see the papers by Goebel and Heil, in this volume).

Like the density of ‘phatic’ phenomena on social media platforms, everyday forms of convivial interaction appear to lead us to views of social

structures that ensure and generate community membership in contexts where sharedness of characteristics, backgrounds and resources is not to be taken for granted. Such insights may be of general relevance for our understanding of contemporary social and cultural dynamics propelled not by ‘thick’ and dense social bonds but by ‘light’ and flexible ones.

ON STRUCTUREThe term ‘social structure’ has been used repeatedly so far. But what exactly do we mean by the term ‘structure’? Usually, we refer to a form of stability, a recurrent characteristic that does not define single cases, but sets and categories of cases. A structure is a generalization—regularities across cases are defined by it – and a projection of an image of a chunk of reality, as the stable, static and timeless characteristics of a system that otherwise can be highly changeable. This is the ‘structure’ of classical structuralism.

In actual fact, and empirically, that to which we assign the label of ‘structure’ is often a feature that is subject to slow change. Empirically, we see a structure when we encounter enduring features, features that change at a very low pace—structure, then, is the durée in a system. Slow change, of course, is change nonetheless and a structure can therefore never be a stable feature, a feature that does not change. It is a feature that changes at a slower pace than others. And—this is crucial—a structure operates along all sorts of features that have a shorter lifespan and a higher pace of change and development, it is part of a complex interplay of different layers of history operating at different speeds upon the same social situation. So if we look for structures, we cannot do that against or in contrast to fast-changing



aspects of the system. The stochastic character of the system compels us to see structures in interaction with other features and to keep in mind that all sorts of non-structural, exceptional and deviant features can cause massive changes in the system – can recreate structures so to say (cf. Blommaert 2013: 115).

The social structures we address in the papers in this collection are, we believe, emergent structures characterizing an evolving social order, the stability of which is permanently under pressure because of the diversity of people and activities that co-construct it—‘human association as a flowing process’ in Herbert Blumer’s (1969: 110) famous words. Looking at the lowest everyday level at which such co-construction proceeds is a tactic employed by Goffman, Blumer, Cicourel and other scholars of an earlier generation, who were dissatisfied with structuralist a priori assumptions about order and stability in social systems, and who assumed that every degree of social order rests on the continuous iterative and made-meaningful enactment of characteristics of such order in everyday behavior. We share that assumption as well as its methodological consequence: that micro-research is at once macro-research, in which a precise understanding of the macro-structures of social life can, and often does, reside in at first inspection insignificant details of people’s social behavior—such as ‘unimportant language’ usage.

REFERENCESBlommaert, Jan. 2013. Ethnography,

Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities

13 (2): 1-21.Blumer, Herbert. 1969 [1998]. Social

Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coupland, Justine (ed). 2000. Small Talk. London: Longman.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: The Free Press.

Jaworski, Adam. 2000. Silence and small talk. In Justine Coupland (ed). Small Talk. London: Longman. 110–132.

Lange, Patricia G. 2009. Videos of affinity on YouTube. In Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds). The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. 70–88.

Lyons, Martyn. 2013. A new history from below? The writing culture of European peasants, c. 1850 – c. 1920. In Anna Kuismin and Matthew Driscoll (eds). White Field, Black Seeds: Nordic Literacy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. 14–29.

Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media, networking and phatic culture. Convergence 14: 387–400.

Thurlow, Crispin and Adam Jaworski. 2011. Banal globalization? Embodied actions and mediated practices in tourists’ online photo-sharing. In Crispin Thurlow and Kristine Mroczek (eds). Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 220–250.

Varis, Piia. 2014. Digital ethnography. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, paper 104. <https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/c428e18c-935f-4d12-8afb-652e19899a30_TPCS_104_Varis.pdf>.

Varis, Piia and Xuan Wang. 2011. Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from China. Diversities 13 (2): 71–83.

Wessendorf, Suzanne. 2010. Commonplace diversity: Social interactions in a super-diverse context. MMG Working Paper 10-11. <http://www.mmg.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/wp/WP_10-11_Wessendorf_Commonplace-Diversity.pdf>.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Imagine walking down the road in your neighbourhood and the old lady

living on your street—who usually greets you when you walk by—is suddenly not answering your friendly greeting anymore. Or your neighbour, with whom you normally exchange some friendly, formalised ‘small talk’ such as ‘Hello, how are you?’ and ‘What bad weather we have today!’, is ignoring your routine attempts at interaction. Imagine sending a text message to a friend you have not heard from for a long time, just to say you are thinking of him and that you hope that everything is alright, but not

getting a text message or a call back; or posting a (in your opinion quite funny) status update on your Facebook wall and none of your 300 Facebook friends ‘likes’ it. Or, finally, imagine a friend of yours, who usually posts a huge (and in your view sometimes irritating) number of tweets daily on his Twitter account, suddenly not tweeting at all.

All the above-mentioned situations would probably make you feel uncomfortable and make you wonder: Did I do something wrong? Have I done something to upset my neighbour or the old lady in my street? Is my friend angry with me for some reason? Was my Facebook post maybe not so funny

‘Hallo hoe gaan dit, wat maak jy?’: Phatic communication,

the mobile phone and coping strategies in a South African

context

Fie VelgheTilburg University

AbstractThis paper looks at the ways in which the mobile phone has become a means through which phatic communication is being expressed. More specifically, the paper shows how, in an impoverished community such as the Wesbank township in South Africa, phatic communication and ‘maintaining a connected presence’ are vital strategies of social networking. In a context of severe and desperate impoverishment, loneliness, chronic unemployment and boredom, the exchange of phatic communicational gestures such as a text message or a short phone call forms one of the many coping strategies that the residents in Wesbank employ to face up to the harsh conditions of poverty and insecurity.

Keywords: mobile phones; phatic communication; conviviality; voice; South Africa

© Velghe and CMDR. 2014


11Hallo, hoe gaan dit?


after all? Is my silent Twitter friend ok? It is only when such daily, routine social interactions cease to take place that we realize their actual importance. When they disappear, we are suddenly left with a feeling of worry or of being unheard and unappreciated. We may think of the other person who infringes the reciprocity of such social interactions as impolite, rude, pretentious or egocentric. This is because such communicational exchanges that do not necessarily intend to inform or exchange any meaningful information do have another, no less important purpose: a social one (Malinowski 1923). With such ‘phatic communication’, one aims to express some kind of sociability and to maintain social connections and bonds (Miller 2008). Even though you know nothing about that old lady living in your street, and apart from ‘Hello, how are you?’ you never really entered into a conversation with her, those simple greetings do give you the feeling of being connected with her in some way. Also, your friendly greetings to your neighbour have made it possible for you to go and ask him, without any feeling of guilt, if you can borrow his drill when you are doing some small jobs in the house. And, although you have not seen your friend for a very long time, an SMS every now and then does, however, give you the feeling of being in touch with him and being updated about his life.

This article looks at how the mobile phone has become a means through which such phatic communication is being expressed and how communications such as a text message, a short call, or a short comment on someone’s Facebook wall ‘becomes part of a mediated phatic sociability necessary to maintain a connected presence’ (Miller 2008: 395). We will see how, in an impoverished community such as the Wesbank township in South Africa, phatic communication and ‘maintaining a

connected presence’ are vital strategies of social networking. In a context of severe and desperate impoverishment, loneliness, chronic unemployment and boredom, the exchange of phatic communicational gestures forms one of the many coping strategies that the residents in Wesbank employ to face up to the harsh conditions of poverty and insecurity.

I will start by giving a brief description of the research site, Wesbank, and then turn to some examples of phatic communication and its socio-economic implications, followed by a review of other literature on phatic communication in relation to poverty and coping strategies.

2. THE FIELD: WESBANKWesbank community, which officially became a residential area in 1999, five years after the abolishment of apartheid, is by all accounts a peripheral township, characterized by poverty, unemployment and high crime rates (Blommaert et al. 2005). It is situated on the Cape Flats, the so-called ‘dumping grounds of apartheid’, a dry and sandy low-lying area 27 kilometres from the centre of Cape Town and surrounded by many other apartheid townships. The building of the township started in 1998 as part of the ‘reconstruction and development programme’ (RDP), a national socio-economic policy framework which the first democratic government in South Africa implemented in 1994 to tackle the economic, racial and spatial legacies of apartheid and to improve government services and basic living conditions for the poor.

The building of Wesbank was one of the first post-apartheid housing projects in the area of Cape Town that was not segregated along racial lines, but was intended to provide housing for deprived

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people irrespective of colour and descent. ‘Black’, ‘coloured’ and some ‘white’ people, and a growing number of African immigrants, live in the same community, although 67% of the population is ‘coloured’ and Afrikaans-speaking (Dyers 2008; Census 2013). This first so-called ‘rainbow community’ gave a home to 25 000 people in 5 149 fully subsidized houses. The actual number of residents is estimated to be much higher, but recent statistics and numbers for the area are not available. All the ‘RDP houses’ in Wesbank have been granted for free to people who were eligible for a full subsidy house, targeting families with a monthly income of less than R3 500 (approximately €266). The low-cost houses have an average size of 25 square metres, are very poorly equipped and not isolated.

Poverty has been a characteristic feature of the population since the first days of Wesbank’s existence. Wesbank has a very low average education rate, with only about 10% of the inhabitants having finished grade 11-12 (Blommaert et al. 2005) . In ward 19, the administrative area that contains Wesbank, only 26.9% of those aged 20 years or older have finished their last year of secondary school (Census 2013). As a consequence, many middle-aged residents are illiterate or sub-literate and unskilled, which makes it very hard for them to find a formal job. While recent unemployment rates for the Wesbank community are not available, the latest report on ward 19 as a whole gives an unemployment rate of 25.8% (Census 2013). The overall basic service delivery is also very limited. Gangsterism and crime rates are very high, mainly due to high unemployment rates, the constant inflow of new residents, easy access to drugs, alcohol and firearms, the absence of a police station in the area and the

flourishing, deeply rooted presence of two big and many small criminal gangs.

3. DATA COLLECTION AND METHODOLOGYThis article draws on three extensive ethnographic fieldwork periods in the community of Wesbank between January 2011 and June 2013, with a total stay of 16 months. The study included in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 33 middle-aged women and one group interview with eight women attending the senior craft club organized in Wesbank. The women interviewed face-to-face were all between 40 and 65 years old, with the exception of one 25-year-old woman. Face-to-face interviews were all held at the women’s premises and lasted between one and two hours. Potential interviewees were selected and introduced with the help of two community workers or by snowball effect, in which interviewees introduced friends or neighbours. Although a list of questions was used as a reference, the interviews were semi-structured, allowing interruptions, follow-up questions and space and time for interviewees to accentuate their own fields of interest.

Other data were gathered by handing out two different questionnaires in the high school, one primary school and the multi-purpose centre in Wesbank. Six interviewees kept a mobile phone diary in a small notebook in which they noted all the text messages and phone calls they made and received during the course of one week. Three cell phone courses were organised in which I was assisted by two teenage girls who taught the participants how to send and read and reply to text messages and/or how to use the internet. In total I have assisted nine women with how to compose, send and answer text messages, six women with how to create



and operate a Facebook and e-mail account, and two women with how to use Google and Wikipedia. All these women have also been interviewed and closely followed up afterwards; I paid them regular visits during which they could ask questions, repeat things learned and during which I could collect a corpus of text messages, screen shots and get a clear view on their learning processes and vulnerabilities.

As much time as possible was spent in the community and daily observations of interactions, literacy classes for adults, social gatherings, family situations, mobile phone use, and informal conversations were written down in a fieldwork diary, following participant observation. Other data included pictures, text messages received and sent, screenshots of Facebook, WhatsApp and MXit conversations, etc. (see Velghe 2014 for a more detailed description).

4. ‘PHATIC’ COMMUNICATION IN A NEW COMMUNICATIVE ENVIRONMENTMalinowski (1923) was the first to use the term ‘phatic exchange’ in ‘describing a communicative gesture that does not inform or exchange any meaningful information or facts about the world’ (Miller 2008: 393), referring to verbal exchanges that primarily serve a social purpose, to express sociability and maintain connections or bonds. Such phatic messages are not intended to carry information or substance to the receiver, but instead concern the process of communication (Miller 2008). According to Vetere et al. (2005), ‘phatic acts ensure existing communication channels are kept open and usable’. Phatic communication thus leaves the door ajar,

so to speak, for further communication, sociability and, as we will see below, survival or coping strategies in a context of severe poverty.

As suggested above, we may think of a person who infringes the reciprocity of a friendly greeting as being impolite, rude, pretentious or even egocentric. We may also, when the person in question is mentioned in a conversation, make comments such as ‘This guy suddenly thinks he is too good for me’ or ‘She is so pretentious’. Leaving out ‘phatic’ gestures in the meeting and greeting of other people can clearly impinge on our feeling of ‘conviviality’ (Blommaert 2012). According to Blommaert (2012: 10), ‘people perform low-intensity and apparently low-salience forms of interaction tailored towards a sense of commonness’ that leads to conviviality. For instance, the many Congolese, Somalian, Nigerian, and Zimbabwean refugees who live in Wesbank and own informal shops and businesses are all very proud of being capable of exchanging greetings with their clients in Afrikaans or isiXhosa, the two main languages spoken in the community. Although expressions such as ‘hallo, hoe gaan dit’ (Afrikaans for ‘hello how are you’) or ‘molo, unjani’ (isiXhosa for ‘hello how are you’) do not carry substantial information to the receiver and instead mainly concern the process of communication, they do have the capacity of strengthening existing relationships in order to facilitate further communication (Vetere et al. 2005, cited in Miller 2008: 394) and to sustain a feeling of conviviality and sociability. According to Miller (2008: 395), ‘one should not assume that these phatic communications are “meaningless”, in fact, in many ways they are meaningful and imply recognition, intimacy, and sociability in which a strong sense of community is founded’.

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Miller (2008: 387) stated that phatic communication ‘has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices’. Through the emergence and high uptake of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) we now have a multitude of channels and devices on which ‘small talk’ and phatic gestures can take place. In what Miller (2008) calls the ‘phatic media culture’, we tend to constantly ‘keep in touch’ in order to ‘maintain a connected presence in an ever-expanding social network’ (Miller 2008: 395). We can chat, skype, tweet, email, ‘poke’, ‘like’, SMS, call, etc., in our attempts to connect with others without being physically present.

According to Lacohée et al. (2003: 206), the mobile phone facilitates communication as ‘the perfect tool for increased levels of social grooming, i.e. letting someone know that you are thinking about them’: text messages can be very low in information but high in ‘social grooming’. In their research on mobile phone use and SMS texting amongst Australian youngsters, Horstmanshof and Power (2005) found that text messaging is primarily used for making connections, affirming relationships and friendship maintenance, fulfilling phatic and social-relational functions. Since phatic interactions create expectations of reciprocation, Horstmanshof and Power (2005) are of the opinion that youngsters are able to find help with boredom and anxiety by reaching out to their friends with text messages in the confident belief that at least one of their friends will respond. As we will see below, middle-aged women in Wesbank also seek recourse on their phones when boredom, insecurity, or a feeling of depression hits them. Also here, (SMS) messages are not necessarily used to exchange ‘content’, but more for the creation of a sense of being in social (phatic) contact with others

(Horstmanshof et al. 2005). Similarly to what Miller and Horst (2006) found in their research, in Wesbank making short and frequent phone calls is another way in which the mobile phone lends itself perfectly as an instrument for phatic interaction: such calls maintain and strengthen ‘presence’ in which the act of calling counts more than what exactly is being said (Licoppe 2004). This is what Horst and Miller (2006) call ‘link-up’ in their anthropological study on mobile phone use amongst low-income families in Jamaica. In a similar vein, Miller (2008) states the following:

we see a shift from dialogue and communication between actors in a network, where the point of the network was to facilitate an exchange of substantive content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network itself has become the primary focus. Here communication has been subordinated to the role of the simple maintenance of ever expanding networks and the notion of a connected presence. (Miller 2008: 398)

As we will see in the next section, in Wesbank, it is exactly the maintenance of networks and social bonds that seems to be the primary focus of a lot of online, offline and face-to-face communication. In a context of severe poverty, the employment of phatic gestures—part and parcel of daily encounters and communicational exchanges—is one of the many coping strategies that the residents of the impoverished community employ in order to deal with the harsh conditions of living their lives in poverty and insecurity. The mobile phone has given the residents a new medium through which they can now maintain, strengthen and extend their relationships and networks with people both from within and outside the community.



5. PHATIC COMMUNICATION AS A SURVIVAL STRATEGYAs mentioned above, the kinds of communicational exchanges that do not necessarily intend to inform or exchange any meaningful information do have another, no less important function: a social one (Malinowski 1923). Greeting the old lady in the street, I did not have the intention to stop and engage in lengthy conversations with her about her private life, politics, or the financial crisis. I greet her because we are both human, because saying hello ‘does not cost a thing’, because it creates a sense of conviviality, and because I do not want to appear as an unfriendly and rude person to her. For the same reasons I say ‘assalamu aleikum’ to the Pakistani shopkeeper in my neighbourhood, with whom I also do not have the intention—let alone the capacity—to engage in further conversations in Urdu or Pashto; yet, my greeting in ‘his’ language creates a kind of sociability and commonness that is always clearly appreciated.

Although people who disregard (the reciprocity of) phatic gestures can be quickly labelled as rude, impolite, pretentious or egocentric, not respecting or failing to engage in phatic exchanges would not necessarily influence our lives in disastrous and life-threatening ways. Had I not greeted my neighbour consistently from our first encounter onwards, he probably would have refused to lend me his drill when I asked for it, or perhaps I would not have asked him to lend me his drill in the first place, since I would not have had the feeling that my level of connection with him lends itself to a request like that. This, however, would hardly have made my life unbearable.

Similarly, greeting the Pakistani shop owner in my neighbourhood with an assalamu alaikum has maybe incited him to sometimes offer me a free loaf of bread, but had I not done that, or greeted him at all, I would still be able to go and shop in his store.

In contrast, for people who live their lives on a shoestring budget, phatic communication can be of vital importance. As mentioned, phatic communication leaves the door ajar, not only for further conversation and sociability, but also for survival and coping strategies. According to Horst and Miller (2006), the primary source of survival amongst low-income populations consists of other people and social networks. Based on their research in Jamaica, they suggested that the mobile phone should, therefore, not be seen as a mere addition to the household or as a luxury item, but ‘as something that dramatically changes the fundamental conditions for survival of low-income Jamaicans, because it is the instrument of their single most important means of survival—communication with other people (Horst and Miller 2006: 57). Social connectedness and connected presence have the possibility of generating a safety network of acquaintances, neighbours, church members, friends, family members, colleagues, old school mates, etc. that can be counted and called upon when help, counselling or advice is needed.

In what follows, we will look at examples of how three Wesbank residents employ phatic gestures on their mobile phones in order to create a connected presence that can help them to cope with the harsh realities of poverty, unemployment and boredom.

LisaLisa is a 45-year-old Wesbank resident and single parent of three children, of

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whom only the youngest, her 13-year-old daughter, still lives with her. Originally from Oudtshoorn, more than 400 km away from Cape Town where most of her brothers and sisters still live, Lisa has been living in Wesbank since the first days of its existence. As a single mother with no regular income, Lisa applied for a full-subsidy house in Wesbank. Between 1999 and 2010, she was able to survive and take care of her family without having a formal, fixed job. Throughout the years, Lisa has established several informal businesses in order to gain just enough money to support her family. She has been buying meat and other groceries in bulk to then sell them with a little bit of profit to other residents; she has made and sold craftwork, and she also participated in a sort of ‘saving group’ of women who collectively contributed a certain amount of money to a central fund, a stokvel. Each month, a different member of the group received the stokvel, giving the members the opportunity to buy groceries in bulk, to cover unexpected household costs, or to invest the money. Lisa has also been buying ‘food stamps’ at Shoprite, one of the biggest supermarkets in South Africa, to then sell them in the community.

However, above all she has been able to survive since she has always been loved and known by many people in the community and, as a member of the New-Born Christians, has also become known as a very devoted Christian, attending church meetings and Bible study several times a week. For as long as I have known her (since 2005) she has always had neighbours and other community members popping in and greeting her on the street and she has always been willing to help—financially, emotionally, or practically—others in the community.

The case of Lisa resembles what Horst and Miller found in their research on Jamaican low-income households: they see networking as vital in understanding coping strategies, but according to them the implications of cause and effect could also be reversed—people give and take not because they need to do so but also in order to facilitate connectedness (Horst and Miller 2006). Lisa’s generosity and friendliness made her connected to a lot of residents of Wesbank who all, in turn, have become part of her safety network.

Instigated by her daughter, Lisa started chatting on the very popular South African mobile instant messaging programme MXit. Very swiftly, Lisa became a fervent and daily MXit chatter using the nickname ‘Sexy Chick’; chatting in chat rooms and on a one-to-one basis mainly with men she had ‘met’ on MXit. She started to live a ‘loose’ sexual life—both virtually as well as offline—by flirting with different men from outside the community and even outside Cape Town, regularly also meeting up with them. The first offline encounter always took place outside the community and for subsequent encounters they either met in a pub, in a hotel, or, when she trusted the man well enough, in her house. MXit had opened a whole new world for Lisa; the adoption of a mobile phone and her phatic chat sessions with unknown men on MXit had made it possible for her to transgress her own immediate life-world and both mentally and physically leave the seclusion of her house and the community. The men she has met have taken her out for dinners, have paid for a night in a hotel, and given her presents and money, etc. Next to tangible things, the chats on MXit have given her the feeling of ‘being out there’ and the possibility to expand her networks and broaden her safety net.



Lisa also used MXit to chat with her son—a soldier based in a province on the other side of the country—and other family members and friends. Figures 1, 2 and 3 below are examples of how Lisa used her mobile phone (MXit and text messaging) to stay in touch with me by the mere exchange of phatic gestures.

Figure 2 is a text message Lisa sent to me when I already had finished my fieldwork stay and had left South

Africa for Belgium. The mobile network operator that Lisa was using charged 1.75 ZAR per international SMS, which is more than double the cost of a national SMS and five times more expensive than a national SMS during off-peak hours. Given that people in Wesbank, on average, buy airtime vouchers of R5, a text message of R1.75 is a considerable amount. Moreover, the text message Lisa sent to me was so short that it only used

Figure 1: Phatic exchanges between ‘Sexy Chick’ and the author (Suikerbossie) on MXit (2011)

Sexy Chick: Suikrbosi10:15

Suikerbossie: Ah!10:16

Sexy Chick: 10:16

Suikerbossie: Sorry, I just forgot to watch the time

10:16

Suikerbossie: I'm reading10:17

Sexy Chick: Wuup210:16

Suikerbossie: Wmj10:18

Suikerbossie: No prob10:18

Sexy Chick: @ da hairdresr n u 10:16

Send

1 Sexy Chick Suikrbosi

2 Sexy Chick

3 Suikerbossie Ah!

4 Suikerbossie Sorry, I just forgot to watch the time

5 Sexy Chick Wuup2 (‘What are you up to’)

6 Suikerbossie I’m reading

7 Suikerbossie Wmj (‘Wat maak jy – what are you doing’)

8 Sexy Chick @ da hairdresr n u (‘at the hairdresser and you’)

9 Sexy Chick No prob (‘no problem’)

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32 of the total of 160 characters available in an SMS. The moment I received the SMS I was in no doubt why Lisa would spend so much money on a text message just to tell me that it was very cold in Cape Town. This seemingly ‘meaningless’ SMS made me smile, made me realize she was thinking of me, and prompted me to take my phone and call her, thus strengthening our bonds although we were thousands of miles apart.

In 2012, Lisa suddenly had a boyfriend whom she had met in Wesbank through mutual friends. Since he did not really have a place to stay—he was sleeping on a mattress in the shop he owned—he had moved in with her at quite an early stage of the relationship. The relationship had its ups and downs, predominantly because of the boyfriend’s extreme jealousy. After moving in, he

had immediately forced her to stop chatting on MXit since ‘she did not need it anymore’. Every couple of weeks, they had huge conflicts and discussions about all the men and women popping in her house without a ‘real’ reason, about Lisa greeting men in the street, doing favours for others, or visiting and spending time with neighbours and other acquaintances in the community, again, according to him, ‘without real purpose’. Lisa desperately, though unsuccessfully, tried to explain to her boyfriend that those encounters and chats were important to her, since it was those very interactions that had helped her survive throughout the years. Her boyfriend regarded the phatic exchanges as being ‘superfluous’ and ‘too much’, and could not understand that Lisa needed those interactions in order to live a comfortable and happy

‘It’s ‘shitty’ cold here our side. Mwah' [onomatopoeic sound for a kiss]

Figure 3: Phatic text message from Lisa to the author (2012)

Dis 'kak' koud hier by ons. Mwah

Send

Hi sissy, nice wethr 4 da bed. Wuup2? Missing u! Mwah!

Send

Figure 2: International phatic text message from Lisa to the author (2012)

‘Hi sissy, nice weather for the bed. What are you up to? Missing you! Mwah!’



life. She mentioned to me several times that she was afraid that her boyfriend would force her to renounce her contacts and networks in the community and thus lose her safety network. Lisa realized well enough that she had always been able to survive in the community by pursuing conviviality and by respecting the importance of phatic gestures and phatic communicational exchanges. She told me that she was worried about the fact that, if she and her boyfriend would ever break up, she would be left alone without a safety network to call or count upon.

KatrienaKatriena grew up on a farm in the countryside. Being the oldest child, she never had the chance to go to school as she had to look after her siblings while her parents were working on the farm. At the age of 16, only capable of writing her name and surname, she had tried to learn how to read and write by herself, copying words she saw around her and trying to decode words and sentences from newspapers and magazines. It was only at the age of 62, when she had started following adult literacy classes in Wesbank, that she attended school for the first time. Very laboriously, she was now capable of reading the Bible and occasionally read magazines and spiritual books. Katriena had had a mobile phone for a couple of years, but had only been able to use the handset to answer and make calls and to send off ‘Please call me’ (PCM) messages1. After following two cell phone courses I organised as part of my fieldwork, Katriena had started using this Short Message Service extensively. I had asked Katriena to keep a cell phone diary of her activities and in the six days following the cell phone courses, she sent 39 text messages, an average of 6.5

messages a day. This is a lot, especially if we look at her cell phone diary for the two months before the courses—during the course of one week, zero messages had been sent and seven received, of which four were advertisement messages from the cell phone carrier and two were PCM messages. Only one was an actual message she had received from a church member who wanted to find out whether Katriena was at home. Looking at the text messages that Katriena sent in the first week after the cell phone course, we see that the text messages were all very short and quite similar to one another (see figures 4-7 below). She started using this new communication channel mainly to greet the addressees and to be informed about their wellbeing, clearly with the intention to open up the new channel that the use of text messages had created for her and to show the addressees that she was ‘out there’, now using the new medium.

In other words, the text messages must be seen as ‘mere’ communicative gestures, expressing sociability and forging connections and networks through a newly discovered medium. Not so much the content, but the act of communication is important here. Katriena is an older lady in her sixties with severe medical problems and going out and walking around in her gang-controlled neighbourhood is a source of great anxiety for her. The use of text messages became the most convenient and safe way for her to stay in touch and link-up with friends, church members, family and even neighbours without having to leave her house.

It was only after some weeks of familiarisation that Katriena’s text messages became longer and changed in content. She started using the SMSs to also exchange information, organise her life, manage her household and to ask for help when

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Figure 4: SMS from Katriena to a family member (2012)

Ek is lief vir julle

Send

'I love all of you'

Figure 5: SMS from Katriena to a church member (2012)

Hai sis hoe gaan dit met u want ek stel nogbelang in u van sist Katriena liefde.

Send

‘Hello sis how are you because I still care for you from sister Katriena love.’

Figure 6: SMS from Katriena to a friend in Wesbank (2012)

Die here is goet vir my ek hoop om die selfde van juo ti hoor

Send

The lord is good to me I hope to hear the same from you’

Figure 7: SMS from Katriena to her daughter (2012)

Halo muisie hoe gaandit met julle twee lieflinge van my hart dit is al waat ek wil weet suster

Send

‘Hello girl how are you two loved ones of my heart that’s all I want to know sister’



needed. For instance, in figure 8, Katriena asks a friend in Wesbank if she could send her son to get her medicines.

All the text messages in which Katriena asked for help (to go and collect her medicines, to water her plants, to come and pick her up for the Sunday service at her church, etc.) were preceded by text messages to the same people with mere phatic content (see figure 9).

After first ‘linking-up’ by sending a phatic text message, Katriena probably thought she was now connected enough to appropriate the new medium for asking for help or favours. In the weeks after the cell phone course, I also received several text messages from Katriena—some to thank me for the lessons, others just to tell me that she had received my messages, that she was at home, or to tell me that she loved me. Suddenly

I also received a text message in which she asked me to lend her R20 for her electricity expenses. She had never asked me for such financial favours before, but apparently was of the opinion that our constant connectedness through SMSs had forged our relationship in such a way that it was now appropriate for her to do that. This presumption is in line with the findings of Horst and Miller (2006), who stated that a lot of mobile phone communication is carried out in the hope of continuously creating new possibilities through personal networking. According to them, the phone is not only used to search for employment or to carry out entrepreneurial work, but even more importantly as the possible creator of extensive networks and as the perfect medium to engage in a large number of small conversations with various

Figure 9: An earlier ‘phatic’ SMS from Katriena to the same friend as in figure 8

Halo ek vir lang na julle ek mis julle beai ek mis julle ek kan nie wag om huis toe te kom nie..

Send

‘Hello I long for you all I miss you all very much I miss you all I cannot wait to come back home..’

Figure 8: SMS from Katriena to a friend in Wesbank (2012)

wat gaan an war om antwood jy my nie of het hy nie die pille ge gaan haal nie laat weet my ek is ge wharrie liefde

Send

‘What is happening why don’t you answer me or did he not go and get the medicines let me know I am worried love’

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contacts, to ‘cast out the net of social communication widely enough for one to hope to finally catch a big fish’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 157).

In figure 8 we also see that Katriena expected answers to her messages and that she got irritated when people did not reply (‘what is happening why don’t you answer me’). Her best friend in Wesbank, who was also present during the cell phone course, never replied to Katriena’s text messages, even after they both had learned how to compose and send them. Katriena always mentioned this to me when I saw her, and her friend’s reluctance to reply was the object of several discussions between them. As mentioned above, phatic interaction creates expectations of reciprocation. Katriena clearly regarded her phatic exchanges as a valued form of communication one should not overlook or ignore. Just as one expects a greeting back when one greets a neighbour in the street, Katriena also expected an answer to her text messages. Messages lacking any form of meaningful information or content, only intended to greet and to ‘link-up’ with people in one’s network, are real communicative gestures with certain intentions, implications and consequences. SMS messages can create new forms of intimacy and can form and deepen relationships, ‘enhancing the ability to be communicatively present while being physically absent’ (Wajcman et al. 2008: 648). Accordingly, when Katriena was away for a week, visiting her birthplace, she sent SMSs to be in constant contact with her son, her neighbour, her daughter and her best friends in Wesbank.

LindaDuring my fieldwork, Linda, a 25-year-old Afrikaans-speaking resident of Wesbank, was living together with her 3-year-old daughter, her mother, her

brother, and her little sister. If tested, Linda would probably be diagnosed with a severe form of dysgraphia. Sitting bored at home, Linda did, however, spend most of her days and nights on MXit, chatting with friends from outside and inside the community. The moment that I met her she was just replacing her mother as a caretaker. After having dropped out of high school she had never been formally employed. Her friends had introduced her to MXit and were still assisting her with her reading and writing on the program. Since the first day she had been on MXit, she had been copying words and sentences with pen and paper from her chat partners and when asking for advice from her friends. Papers and notebooks in which Linda had taken ‘textspeak’2 notes—words, sentences, and expressions she might copy and use in the future—were scattered all over the house. This ‘corpus’ of copied material was the main instrument by means of which she was capable of sustaining and extending her (virtual and offline) network. When Linda engaged in MXit interactions, she copied standard ‘passe partout’ phrases and expressions. These writing resources formed a tightly closed package of copied and memorized words as she could hardly improvise and innovate in her writing, she asked standard questions such as ‘wat maak jy’ (‘what are you doing’), ‘hoe gaan dit’ (‘how are you?’) and was able to reply to such predictable and phatic questions by means of routine answers (‘ek is bored’ – ‘I am bored’ – ‘ek is by die werk’ – ‘I’m at work’). This way she could keep conversations going for a while; through the use of these phatic expressions, she managed to appear as a competent user of MXit and this apparently satisfied the requirements of interaction and her wish to be in touch with her social network (Blommaert and Velghe 2012).



In the transcribed instant chat messages between Linda and me (see conversation 1 and 2 below), phatic expressions are omnipresent. Both conversations are predominantly in Afrikaans textspeak. The ‘standard’ Afrikaans spelling is given between brackets in the third column and the English translation can be found in the last column on the right. In the first conversation, one can see that the whole exchange did not transcend mere phatic exchanges (‘how are you’, ‘I am at home’, ‘what are you doing now’, etc.). Linda’s sentences were all very short and she was clearly taking fewer turns in the conversation than me. When I tended to exceed the phatic content by using longer sentences or asking a lot of questions, she

simply did not answer me. When I asked her how long she still had to work, she kept quiet until I asked her a new question nine minutes later (see: ‘I hope everything is ok at your job’), probably because she did not understand my first two questions (‘For how many days?’ and ‘For how many nights?’).

During the second conversation, the limitations of Linda’s literacy repertoire became very clear. I opened the conversation with two general phatic questions (‘alles goed?’ en ‘wmj?’) and I receive a general, routine answer (‘I’m just sitting here watching tv and you?’). In the two next turns, I answered Linda’s ‘and you?’ question by providing information about my whereabouts and

17:50 Me: Linda: Dag Linda hoe gaan dit? Hello Linda how are you

17:50 Linda: leka en mt jo (lekker en met jou) Good and you

17:52 Me: Joh ek kan die kleur van jou letters baie moeilik lees!

Joh, I can hardly read the colour of your letters!

17:53 Linda: ohk Ok

17:54 Me: Mr alles gan goed But everything’s ok

17:54 Me: Ek is by die huis I’m at home

17:56 Linda: O O

17:57 Me: Wat het jy gemaak vandag? What did you do today?

17:57 Linda: Wmjdn (wat maak jy dan nou) What are you doing now?

17:58 Me: Ek werk op my computer I’m working on my computer

17:58 Linda: by die werk nu At work right

17:58 Me: Ek moet n article skryf I have to write an article

17:58 Me: Is jy by die werk? Are you at your work?

17: 59 Linda: k Ok

17: 59 Linda: jip Yes

18:00 Me: Vir hoeveel dae? For how many days?

18:00 Me: Vir hoeveel nagte? For how many nights?

18:09 Me: Ek hoop alles gaan goed met die werk I hope everything is ok at your job

18:09 Linda: ja baie goed Yes, very good

18:10 Me: Dit is goed om te werk It is good to work

18:10 Me: Wanneer gaan jy huis toe? When are you going home?

18:10 Me: Mre (môre) Tomorrow

Conversation 1:

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activities (‘I’m at home’ and ‘I’m reading for university’) to then, in the third turn, inquire about the meaning of ‘siu’. Linda first answers with ‘what?’ after which I repeat my inquiry (‘You write siu but I don’t know what that means’) but I only get an ‘ohk’ as an answer. Linda tried to bring the conversation back to a mere phatic exchange by immediately posting another routine, standard question (‘what are you going to do today?’). I gave a routine answer to that question (‘I stay at home to work’), but before I did that I asked her another informational question about the status line she had written in her profile (‘what is csclol in your status?’). On MXit like on other social media platforms, members

can enter a status—often a slogan or a motto—in their profile. Linda was changing her profile status almost daily, another sign of her desire to be perceived as a competent user. Probably a copy or a transcription from a dictation by one of her friends, Linda’s status that day read: ‘WU RUN THE WORLD GALZ … WU FOK THE GALZ BOYS … LMJ NW HOE NOW::op=csclol=@’ (‘who runs the world girls … who fuck the girls boys …’). Linda probably accurately copied part of the phrase into her status, but the end of the status was very unclear and looked rather like a random compilation of signs. As an ethnographer in the field I had been deeply immersed in informal learning practices of textspeak

10:47 Me: Alles goed? Everything alright?

10:50 Me: Wmj? (wat maak jy) What are you doing?

10:49 Linda: Siu ma hier kijk tv nj (… en jy) Just sitting here watching tv and you

10:51 Me: Ek is by die huis I’m at home

10:51 Me: Ek lees vir die universiteit I’m reading for university

10:52 Me: Wat is siu? What is siu?

10:52 Linda: ohk Ohk

10:52 Linda: wt? What?

10:53 Me: jy skryf siu mar ek weetnie wat dat beteken’ie

You write siu but I don’t know what that means

10:54 Linda: ok Ok

10:54 Linda: wat gaan jy vandag mk What are you going to do today

10:55 Me: wat is csclol in jou status What is csclol in your status

10:55 Me: Ek bly by die huis om te werk I stay at home to work

10:56 Linda: x weetie I don’t know

10:57 Linda: ohk ok

10:57 Me: jy skryf dit in jou status You write this in your status

10:59 Linda: ja yes

10:59 Me: En wat beteken dit? Ek is nuuskierig And what does that mean? I’m curious

11:00 “Linda is now busy” Status message

11:02 Linda: g2g Got to go

11:02 “Linda is now offline” Status message

Conversation 2:



(see Velghe 2011) and was thus used to constantly inquiring into the meaning of what I received and perceived. By asking Linda what csclol meant, I forced her again to transcend the mere phatic exchange of routine, standard questions and answers. Linda first answered with ‘I don’t know’ after which I told her that she however had written csclol in her status, implying that she should know what she had written. She answered with a ‘yes’ two minutes afterwards (a marked pause in an instant messaging environment) after which I again clarified my question (‘what does it mean? I am curious’). Suddenly after that, however, the status message ‘Linda is now busy’ appeared on my screen, followed by Linda writing a standardized ‘g2g’ (textspeak for ‘got to go’) and effectively going offline (Blommaert and Velghe 2012).

In the two transcribed instant messaging conversations, it is clear that Linda was quite fluent in asking and answering routine, phatic questions (How are you? What are you doing? I am at work. I am watching television and you?, etc.). She seemed, however, to quickly reach her literacy limit when different questions, requiring generative, non-routine answers and exceeding mere phatic content, were being asked. In order to avoid being exposed as a dysgraphic or ‘illiterate’ person, my insistence on an explanation forced her to withdraw from our conversation (Blommaert and Velghe 2012).

Sitting bored at home, MXit chatting was one of the most important (social) activities in Linda’s life. Through a limited set of interactional practices, Linda managed somehow to be seen as a competent MXit chatter by her network of MXit friends. The reason that she managed to be seen as a ‘fully competent’ member was because her messages were less seen as linguistic objects than as

indexical ones, not as carriers of intricate denotational meanings but as phatic messages that supported Linda’s role as a group member and defined her relations with her peers as agreeable and friendly (Blommaert and Velghe 2012: 20). Linda’s use of textspeak was not primarily a use of ‘language’, it was a deployment of voice—of a sign system that opened channels of peer-group communication and conviviality, and established and confirmed Linda’s place in her network of friends (Blommaert and Velghe 2012: 20). In other words, Linda did not invest so much time and effort in the learning and writing of these signs because they enabled her to express denotational meaning (we have seen the limits of her generative writing and reading skills), but because they were a crucial and essential social instrument for her; one of the few very valuable instruments she possessed to make herself recognizable and respected as a human being. Through the support of her friends and her amassed ‘corpus of textspeak’, Linda was able to apply the mere phatic exchanges in order to be ‘out there’, be in constant social contact with others from within the four walls of her small house, and build a sense of conviviality while almost ‘saying nothing’. Because of her disability, phatic exchanges for Linda, were of vital importance since they were the only possible way to be in touch and connect with the world around her.

6. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONMost of what has been discussed here is in line with the research by Horst and Miller (2005, 2006) on low-income families in Jamaica. More focussed on calling

26 VELGHE


practices with the mobile phone, Horst and Miller have introduced the term link-up to refer to the extensive networking practices of very short phone calls to a lot of different contacts in people’s networks (Horst and Miller 2006). Those link-up calls often have merely phatic content or aims, consisting of questions such as ‘Hi how is everything?’ or ‘wa gwaan?’ (Jamaican Creole for ‘what is going on?’) and replies such as ‘Oh, I’m ok, I’m just enjoying summer’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 96). According to them, link-up is characterised by very short calls made every couple of weeks to a high number of contacts, in order to keep the contact lists constantly active (Horst and Miller 2005: 760). According to the main cell phone carrier in Jamaica, the average mobile phone call there lasts only 19 seconds (Horst and Miller 2006: 96). The most important aspect of those phone calls is not the content of the conversations but ‘their use to maintain connections over time’, all of these interactions ‘representing potential connections that were usually operationalized only at the time of a specific need’ (Horst and Miller 2005: 760). The link-up calls are ‘extensively used for economic development and coping but it is not particular to times of need’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 96). Horst and Miller see these link-up calls as a consequence of the characteristic of Jamaican communication, in which the desire to forge links and to be in touch about ‘nothing in particular’ becomes important in its own right (Horst and Miller 2006: 96). The predominantly phatic link-up calls observed by Horst and Miller in low-income settings in rural and urban Jamaica tended to create safety networks that eventually could be activated in relation to monetary, emotional, practical or sexual needs. The functions of the Jamaican link-up

phenomenon are thus similar to what Lisa was achieving by popping in on a regular basis at friends’ and neighbours’ houses in Wesbank, or Katriena using her text messages to set doors ajar to sociability with people in her (mobile phone) network, and Linda having routine conversations on MXit.

According to Horst and Miller (2006: 97), link-up has become the foundation to communication in Jamaica as well the basis of networking: it can be built upon ‘to create relationships, realize projects and gain support, whether emotionally, practically or financially’. Similarly to the case of Wesbank residents discussed here, Horst and Miller stated that:

What the poorest individuals really lack is not so much food, but these critical social networks. The cell phone and its ability to record and recall upon 400 numbers, is therefore the ideal tool for a Jamaican trying to create the ever-changing social networks that Jamaicans feel are ultimately more reliable than a company, employer or even a parent or spouse alone. This feature, perhaps more than any other, represents the critical economic impact of the cell phone in Jamaica. (Horst and Miller 2006: 111)

In other words, the difference between being destitute and not being destitute is, according to Miller (2006), a difference between having or not having friends or family that one can call upon in times of need. Horst and Miller found that in their rural research site, only 10% of the population were formally employed in reliable, regularly paid jobs and more than half the household incomes in their survey came from social networking rather than from any kind of labour or sales (Horst and Miller 2005: 761). Similarly, since so many Wesbank residents are (chronically)



unemployed, they mainly survive thanks to the generous support coming from family, boyfriends, husbands, fellow church members, friends and neighbours, small and temporary informal sector employment such as the ones that Lisa had been involved in, or by applying for social security benefits such as child care and disability grants, or pensions.

In his response to the claim that the uptake of mobile phones in the developing world would generate an increased GDP, a general increase of income for the poorest of the poor, and close the so-called digital divide between the developed and developing countries with regards to access to ICTs, Miller (2006) stated that the vast majority of low-income individuals in Jamaica—just like in Wesbank—did not use their phone for entrepreneurial activities or to obtain formal employment. The critical economic impact of the mobile phone in Jamaica—and in my view more generally in the underdeveloped or developing parts of the world—is not due to its ability to generate income or to ‘make money’ (Miller 2008) but to its ability to ‘get money’ or, in other words, to immediately ameliorate financial or emotional ‘suffering’ (Miller 2008) through connectedness and sociability. Used as a means to this kind of ‘conviviality’, the mobile phone should thus not be seen as a luxury item that places an even heavier burden on people’s finances, but as a necessity that is vital to mere survival and as ‘an effective instrument for assisting in low-level redistribution of money from those who have little to those who have least’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 114). The more people one has in one’s social network, the more shock-resistant one becomes and through social networking and conviviality, Wesbank residents realized the need for ‘casting out their safety nets’ (Horst and Miller 2006: 157). The exchange of phatic gestures, whether face-to-face or ‘virtually’,

has a clear influence on our perception of others, and being known in the community as a friendly, caring and benevolent person proved to be extremely helpful in coping with harsh conditions of poverty, insecurity, boredom and loneliness in Wesbank. As a communication tool, the mobile phone has proven to be the perfect instrument for such phatic exchanges and thus, for extending and strengthening one’s networks, making it possible to link-up through short phone calls, text messages, Facebook wall posts, chat messages or PCM messages (see also Bidwell et al. 2011 on rural communities in South Africa).

Vincent Miller (2008: 393) stated that current communicative practices on Facebook and other social networking sites ‘are motivated less by having something in particular to say (i.e. communicating some kind of information), as it is by the obligation or encouragement to say “something” to maintain connections to audiences, to let one’s network know that one is still “there”’. Text, chat or Facebook messages should thus not only be looked at as ‘linguistic’ objects (as carriers of denotational meanings), but as indexical objects that are meant to be used to ‘socialize’ with others. We should measure these phatic exchanges by the standards of the indexical order of conviviality, instead of by the standards of language only. Language and literacy are always the means to (obtain) voice (‘to let one be heard and understood’). Using phatic exchanges is a deployment of voice—of a sign system that opens channels of communication and conviviality and that establishes human beings as members of communities and networks that in places like Wesbank can be vital for survival. For people in Wesbank, making sure that people know that you are still ‘there’ can have an influence on whether one will have bread on the table at the end of the day or not. The exchange of phatic gestures is

28 VELGHE


not a new phenomenon and neither is the exchange of phatic gestures as a coping strategy in impoverished communities like Wesbank. The high uptake of the mobile phone has given the people just another means through which they can now ‘cast out their nets’ and create extended networks through extensive rather than intensive calling and texting. It has given the people a new instrument for communication and networking that can be used from within the safe environment of the home, spanning forever increasing circles of acquaintances and distances.

ENDNOTES1 In this article I call Wesbank a

‘community’ instead of a ‘township’, ‘settlement’, or ‘area’. Residents of the area themselves refer to Wesbank as ‘a community’, both in the physical sense (community as a place or an area) but also in the social sense (community as a group of people).

2 The term ‘coloured’ remains problematic, as it formed part of the segregation policy of the apartheid government to clearly define and divide different sections of the South African population. On the other hand it is a firmly entrenched term and the racial categorizing terminology still persists in the appellation of people of mixed race (‘coloureds’) and ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’, and is still used by the South African population itself. In this article inverted commas are used to indicate this dilemma.

3 Exchange rate on May 26, 2015. 4 Here again, more recent statistics for the

area are, unfortunately, not available. 5 Ward 019 includes the areas of Blue

Downs CBD, Brentwood Park, Camelot, Delro Village, Driftsands, Gersham, Hagley, Highbury, Highbury Park, Highgate, Hindle Park, Rotterdam, Silversands, Stellendale, Sunbird Park, Wembley Park, and Wesbank. Most of them are socio-economically and demographically similar to Wesbank.

6 MXit can be accessed on mobile phones and is comparable to computer-based instant messaging programs such as MSN Messenger. MXit users can chat either in chat rooms (often centred around specific themes, geographical locations or age groups) or one-to-one with contacts one has to invite and accept (Chigona and Chigona 2008). The fast growth and popularity of MXit may partly be attributed to its cheap costs; a MXit message costs 2 South African Rand cents compared to 70 cents for an SMS (Chigona and Chigona 2008).

7 A PCM message or ‘Please call me’ message is a free service offered by the cell phone providers; it allows sending free text messages to any other telephone number in cases of emergency when one runs out of airtime with a request to call back. Those free messages – a daily limited amount of them – read ‘please call me’ and feature the number requesting the call-back, followed by an advertisement. Nowadays, one can add a short personal message of ten characters to these PCMs and personalise the telephone number by adding one’s own name or nickname. For many middle-aged ‘subliterate’ women in Wesbank, a PCM is next to calling and receiving calls the only thing they (can) use their handsets for.

8 ‘Textspeak’ is the name given to the global medialect or the mobile texting codes, characterized by abbreviations, acronyms, initialisms, non-standard spellings and emoticons.

REFERENCESAchmat, Fowzia and Ashley Losch. 2002.

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Bidwell, Nicola J., Mounia Lamas, Gary Marsden, Bongiwe Dlutu, Matt Jones,



Bill Tucker, Elina Vartiainen, Iraklis Klampanos, and Simon Robinson. 2011. Please call ME.N.U.4EVER: Callback and social media sharing in rural Africa. Proceedings 10th International Workshop in Internalisation of Products and System. Malaysia. 117-138.

Blommaert, Jan. 2012. Complexity, accents and conviviality: Concluding comments. AAAL 2012. Panel on ‘Constructing identities in transnational spaces’. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 26. <http://www.tilburguniversity.edu/research/institutes-and-research-groups/babylon/tpcs/>

Blommaert, Jan and Fie Velghe. 2012. Learning a supervernacular: Textspeak in a South African township. In Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (eds). Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy. New York: Springer. 137-154.

Blommaert, Jan, Nathalie Muyllaert, Marieke Huysmans and Charlyn Dyers. 2005. Peripheral normativity: Literacy and the production of locality in a South African township school. Linguistics in Education: An International Research Journal 16 (4): 378-403.

Depypere, Hannelore and Fie Velghe. 2005. Passed and past in the present: The persistence of history in Wesbank, a post-apartheid township in South Africa. University of Gent. Unpublished MA Thesis.

Dyers, Charlyn. 2008. Language shift or maintenance? Factors determining the use of Afrikaans among some township youth in South Africa. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38: 49-72.

Chigona, Agnes and Wallace Chigona. 2008. Mixt it up in the media: Media discourse analysis on a mobile instant messaging system. The Southern African Journal of Information and Communication 9: 42-57.

City of Cape Town. 2013. 2011 Census—Ward 019. <https://www.capetown.gov.za/en/stats/Documents/2011%20Census/Wards/2011_Census_CT_Ward_019_

Profile.pdf>Horst, A. Heather and Daniel Miller. 2005.

From kinship to link-up. Cell phones and social networking in Jamaica. Current Anthropology 46 (5): 755-778.

Horst, A. Heather and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford, New York: Berg Publishers.

Horstmanshof, Louise and Mary R. Power. 2005. Mobile phones, SMS, and relationships: Issues of access, control, and privacy. Australian Journal of Communication 32 (1): 33-52.

Lacohée, Hazel, Nina Wakeford and Ian Pearson. 2003. A social history of the mobile telephone with a view of its future. BT Technology Journal 21 (3): 203-211.

Licoppe, Christian. 2004. ‘Connected’ presence: The emergence of a new repertoire for managing social relationships in a changing communication technoscape. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 135-156.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. Supplement 1: The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards (eds). The Meaning of Meaning. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. 296-336.

Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media, networking and phatic culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (4): 387-400.

Miller, Daniel. 2006. The unpredictable mobile phone. BT Technology Journal 24 (3): 41-48.

Velghe, Fie. 2014. ‘This Is Almost Like Writing’. Mobile Phones, Learning and Literacy in a 100%South African Township. Tilburg University. Unpublished PhD thesis.

Velghe, Fie. 2011. Lessons in textspeak from Sexy Chick: Supervernacular literacy in South African instant and text messaging. In Kasper Juffermans, Yonas Mesfun Asfaha, and Ashraf Abdelhay

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(eds). African Literacies: Ideologies, Texts, Education. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 61-85.

Vetere, Frank, Steve Howard and Martin R. Gibbs. 2005. Phatic technologies: Sustaining sociability through ubiquitous computing. Workshop Paper, Uniquitous Society Workshop. ACM CHI 2005, Portland, Oregon, 2-7 April 2005. <https://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/events/ubisoc2005/UbiSoc%202005%20submissions/12-Vetere-Frank.pdf>

Wajcman, Judy, Michael Bittman and Judith E. Brown. 2008. Families without borders: Mobile phones, connectedness and home-work divisions. Sociology 42 (4): 635-652.

Zainudeen, Ayesha, Rohan Samarajiva and Ayoma Abeysuriya. 2006. Telecom use on a shoestring: Strategic use of telecom services by the financially constrained in South Asia. WDR Dialogue Theme 3rd Cycle Discussion Paper, WBR0604, Version 2.0. <http://ssrn.com/abstract=1554747>

31

Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes, and

new social structures

Piia Varis Tilburg University

Jan BlommaertTilburg University and Ghent University

AbstractThere is a long tradition in which ‘phatic’ forms of interaction are seen as (and characterized by) relatively low levels of ‘information’ and ‘meaning’. Yet, observations on social media interaction patterns show an amazing density of such phatic interactions, in which signs are shared and circulated without an a priori determination of the meaning. We address the issue of ‘virality’ in this paper: the astonishing speed and scope with which often ‘empty’ (i.e. not a priori determined) signs circulate online. We address ‘memes’—signs that have gone viral on the internet—as cases in point. Virality as a sociolinguistic phenomenon raises specific issues about signs, meanings, and functions, prompting a shift from ‘meaning’ to ‘effect’. This effect, we can see, is conviviality: the production of a social-structuring level of engagement in loose, temporal, and elastic collectives operating in social media environments.

Keywords: phatic communion; social media; virality; memes; meaning; function; community; identity

1. INTRODUCTION

In a very insightful and relatively early paper on the phenomenon, Vincent

Miller (2008) questions the ‘content’ of communication on social media and microblogs (Facebook and Twitter, respectively), and concludes:

We are seeing how in many ways the internet has become as much about interaction with others as it has about accessing information. (…) In the drift from blogging, to social networking, to microblogging

we see a shift from dialogue and communication between actors in a network, where the point of the network was to facilitate an exchange of substantive content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network itself has become the primary focus. (…) This has resulted in a rise of what I have called ‘phatic media’ in which communication without content has taken precedence. (Miller 2008: 398)

Miller sees the avalanche of ‘empty’ messages on new social media as an illustration of the ‘postsocial’ society in

© Varis, Blommaert and CMDR. 2015


32 VARIS AND BLOMMAERT


which networks, rather than (traditional, organic) communities, are the central fora for establishing social ties between people. The messages are ‘empty’ in the sense that no perceptibly ‘relevant content’ is being communicated; thus, such messages are typologically germane to the kind of ‘small talk’ which Bronislaw Malinowski (1923 [1936]) identified as ‘phatic communion’ and described as follows:

‘phatic communion’ serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas (Malinowski 1923 [1936]: 316).

For Malinowski, phatic communion was a key argument for his view that language should not just be seen as a carrier of propositional contents (‘communicating ideas’ in the fragment above), but as a mode of social action, the scope of which should not be reduced to ‘meaning’ in the denotational sense of the term. In an excellent paper on the history of the term ‘phatic communion’, Gunter Senft notes the post-hoc reinterpretation of the term by Jakobson (1960) as ‘channel-oriented’ interaction, and describes phatic communion as

utterances that are said to have exclusively social, bonding functions like establishing and maintaining a friendly and harmonious atmosphere in interpersonal relations, especially during the opening and closing stages of social – verbal – encounters. These utterances are understood as a means for keeping the communication channels open. (Senft 1995: 3)

Senft also emphasizes the difference between ‘communion’ and ‘communication’. Malinowski never used the term phatic

‘communication’, and for a reason: ‘communion’ stresses (a) the ritual aspects of phatic phenomena, and (b) the fact that through phatic communion, people express their sense of ‘union’ with a community. We will come back to this later on.

When it came to explaining the phenomenon, Malinowski saw the fear of silence, understood as an embarrassing situation in interaction among Trobriand Islanders, as the motive underlying the frequency of phatic communion. In order not to appear grumpy or taciturn to the interlocutor, Trobrianders engaged in sometimes lengthy exchanges of ‘irrelevant’ talk. While Malinowski saw this horror vacui as possibly universal, Dell Hymes cautioned against such an interpretation and suggested that ‘the distribution of required and preferred silence, indeed, perhaps most immediately reveals in outline form a community’s structure of speaking’ (Hymes 1972 [1986]: 40; see Senft 1995: 4-5 for a discussion). There are indeed communities where, unless one has anything substantial to say, silence is strongly preferred over small talk and ‘phatic communion’ would consequently be experienced as an unwelcome violation of social custom. This is clearly not the case in the internet communities explored by Vincent Miller, where ‘small’ and ‘content-free’ talk appears to be if not the rule, then certainly a very well-entrenched mode of interaction.

This, perhaps, compels us to take ‘phatic’ talk seriously, given that it is so hard to avoid as a phenomenon in social media, for example. And this, then, would be a correction to a deeply ingrained linguistic and sociolinguistic mindset in which ‘small talk’—the term itself announces it—is not always perceived as really important or in need of much in-depth exploration.

33Conviviality and collectives on social media


Schegloff ’s (1972; Schegloff and Sacks 1973) early papers on conversational openings and closings described these often routinized sequences as a mechanism in which speaker and hearer roles were established and confirmed. This early interpretation shows affinity with Malinowski’s ‘phatic communion’—the concern with the ‘channel’ of communicationas well as with Erving Goffman’s (1967) concept of ‘interaction ritual’ in which people follow particular, relatively perduring templates that safeguard ‘order’ in face-to-face interaction. In an influential later paper, however, Schegloff (1988) rejected Goffman’s attention to ‘ritual’ and ‘face’ as instances of ‘psychology’ (in fact, as too much interested in the meaning of interaction), and reduced the Goffmanian rituals to a more ‘secularized’ study of interaction as a formal ‘syntax’ in which human intentions and subjectivities did not matter too much. The question of what people seek to achieve by means of ‘small talk’, consequently, led a life on the afterburner of academic attention since. When it occurred it was often labelled as ‘mundane’ talk, that is: talk that demands not to be seen as full of substance and meaning, but can be analyzed merely as an instance of the universal formal mechanisms of human conversation (Briggs 1997 provides a powerful critique of this). Evidently, when the formal patterns of phatic communion are the sole locus of interest, not much is left to be said on the topic.

As mentioned, the perceived plenitude of phatic communion on the internet pushes us towards attention to such ‘communication without content’. In what follows, we will engage with this topic and focus on a now-current internet phenomenon: memes. Memes will be introduced in the next section, and we shall focus on (a) the notion of ‘viral spread’ in relation to agentivity and

consciousness, and (b) the ways in which we can see ‘memes’, along with perhaps many of the phenomena described by Miller, as forms of conviviality. In a concluding section, we will identify some important implications of this view.

2. GOING VIRALOn January 21, 2012 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an update on his Facebook profile, introduced by ‘Here’s some interesting weekend reading’ (figure 1). The message itself was 161 words long, and it led to a link to a 2000-word article. Within 55 seconds of being posted, the update got 932 ‘likes’ and was ‘shared’ 30 times by other Facebook users. After two minutes, the update had accumulated 3,101 ‘likes’ and 232 ‘shares’.

Given the structure and size of the text posted by Zuckerberg, it is quite implausible that within the first two minutes or so, more than 3,000 people had already read Zuckerberg’s update and the article which it provides a link to, deliberated on its contents and judged it ‘likeable’; and the same goes for the more than 200 times that the post had already been shared on other users’ timelines. So what is happening here?

Some of the uptake can probably be explained with ‘firsting’, i.e. the preoccupation to be the first to comment on or ‘like’ an update on social media—most clearly visible in the form of comments simply stating ‘first!’. Another major explanation could be ‘astroturfing’: it is plausible that many of those who ‘like’ and ‘share’ Zuckerberg’s update are in fact Facebook employees deliberately attempting to increase its visibility. We can guess, but we simply do not know. What we do know for sure, however, is that as a consequence of a first level of uptake—people liking and sharing the post—there



are further and further levels of uptake, as other users witness this liking and sharing activity (some of it may already be showing in the figures here), and consequently make inferences about the meaning of the post itself, but also about the person(s) in their network who reacted to it. Further layers of contextualisation are thus added to the original post, which may have an influence on the uptake by others.

Different social media platforms offer similar activity types: YouTube users can ‘view’ videos and ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ them, as well as adding ‘comments’ to them and adding videos to a profile list of preferences; Twitter users can create ‘hashtags’ and ‘retweet’ tweets from within their network; similar operations are possible on Instagram as well as on most local or regional social media platforms available throughout the world. Each time, we see that specific activities are made available for the

rapid ‘viral’ spread of particular signs, while the actual content or formal properties of those signs do not seem to prevail as criteria for sharing, at least not when these properties are understood as denotational-semantic or aesthetic in the Kantian sense. We shall elaborate this below. The ace of virality after the first decade of the 21st century is undoubtedly the South-Korean music video called Gangnam Style, performed by an artist called Psy: Gangnam Style was posted on YouTube on 15 July, 2012, and had been viewed 2,345475395 times on 30 May, 2015. Professional as well as lay observers appear to agree that the phenomenal virality of Gangnam Style was not due to the intrinsic qualities, musical, choreographic or otherwise, of the video. The hype was driven by entirely different forces.

The point to all of this, however, is that we see a communicative phenomenon of

Figure 1: Screenshot of Zuckerberg’s status update on Facebook, January 21, 2012



astonishing speed and scope: large numbers of people react on a message by expressing their ‘liking’ and by judging it relevant enough to share it with their ‘friends’ within their social media community. At the same time, in spite of Zuckerberg’s message being textual, it was not read in the common sense understanding of this term. The ‘like’ and ‘share’ reactions, consequently, refer to another kind of decoding and understanding than the ones we conventionally use in text and discourse analysis—‘meaning’ as an outcome of denotational-textual decoding is not at stake here, and so the ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ is best seen as ‘phatic’ in the sense of the terms discussed above. Yet, these phatic activities appear to have extraordinary importance for those who perform them, as ‘firsting’ and ‘astroturfing’ practices illustrate: people on social media find it very important to be involved in ‘virality’. People find it important to be part of a group that ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ items posted by others. It is impossible to know—certainly in the case of Zuckerberg—who the members of this group effectively are (this is the problem of scope, and we shall return to it), but this ignorance of identities of group members does seem to matter less than the expression of membership by means of phatic ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. What happens here is ‘communion’ in the sense of Malinowski: identity statements expressing, pragmatically and metapragmatically, membership of some group. Such groups are not held together by high levels of awareness and knowledge of deeply shared values and functions—the classical community of Parsonian sociology—but by loose bonds of shared, even if superficial interest or ‘ambient affiliation’ in Zappavigna’s terms (2011: 801), enabled by technological features of social media affording forms

of searchability and findability of ‘like’-minded people.

We need to be more specific though, and return to our Facebook example. ‘Liking’ is an identity statement directly oriented towards the author of the update—Zuckerberg—and indirectly inscribing oneself into the community of those who ‘like’ Zuckerberg, as well as indirectly flagging something to one’s own community of Facebook ‘friends’ (who can monitor activities performed within the community). Patricia Lange (2009: 71), thus, qualifies such responsive uptake activities (‘viewing’ YouTube videos in her case) as forms of ‘self-interpellation’: people express a judgment that they themselves belong to the intended audiences of a message or sign. ‘Sharing’, by contrast, recontextualizes and directly reorients this statement towards one’s own community, triggering another phase in a process of viral circulation, part of which can—but must not—involve real ‘reading’ of the text. Also, ‘liking’ is a responsive uptake to someone else’s activity while ‘sharing’ is the initiation of another activity directed at another (segment of a) community. So, while both activities share important dimensions of phaticity with each other, important differences also occur. These distinctions, as noted, do not affect the fundamental nature of the interaction between actors and signs—‘sharing’, as we have seen, does not presuppose careful reading of the text—but there are differences in agency and activity type.

This is important to note, because existing definitions of virality would emphasize the absence of significant change in the circulation of the sign. Limor Shifman (2011: 190), for instance, emphasizes the absence of significant change to the sign itself to distinguish virality from ‘memicity’: memes, as opposed to viral signs, would involve



changes to the sign itself. We shall see in a moment that this distinction is only valid when one focuses on a superficial inspection of the formal properties of signs. When one takes social semiotic activities as one’s benchmark, however, things become more complicated and more intriguing. We have seen that significant distinctions apply to ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’. In fact, we can see both as different genres on a gradient from phatic communion to phatic communication: there are differences in agency, in the addressees and communities targeted by both activities and in the fundamental pragmatic and metapragmatic features of both activities.

To clarify the latter: ‘sharing’ an update on Facebook is a classic case of ‘re-entextualization’ (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996) or ‘re-semiotization’ (Scollon and Scollon 2004). Re-entextualization refers to the process by means of which a piece of ‘text’ (a broadly defined semiotic object here) is extracted from its original context-of-use and re-inserted into an entirely different one, involving different participation frameworks, a different kind of textuality—an entire text can be condensed into a quote, for instance—and ultimately also very different meaning outcomes. What is marginal in the source text can become important in the re-entextualized version, for instance. Re-semiotization, in line with the foregoing, refers to the process by means of which every ‘repetition’ of a sign involves an entirely new set of contextualization conditions and thus results in an entirely ‘new’ semiotic process, allowing new semiotic modes and resources to be involved in the repetition process (Leppänen et al. 2014). The specific affordances for responsive and sharing activities

offered by social media platforms are thus not unified or homogeneous: we can distinguish a gradient from purely responsive uptake to active and redirected re-entextualization and resemiotization, blurring the distinction made by Shifman between virality and memicity.

Let us have a closer look at memes now, and focus again on the different genres of memic activity we can discern.

3. THE WEIRD WORLD OF MEMESAs we have seen, Shifman locates the difference between virality and memicity in the degree to which the sign itself is changed in the process of transmission and circulation. Memes are signs the formal features of which have been changed by users. For her definition, Shifman draws on Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976), who coined ‘meme’ by analogy with ‘gene’ as ‘small cultural units of transmission (…) which are spread by copying or imitation’ (Shifman 2011: 188). We have already seen, however, that even simple ‘copying’ or ‘imitation’ activities such as Facebook ‘sharing’ involve a major shift in activity type called re-entextualization. Memes, often multimodal signs in which images and texts are combined, would typically enable intense resemiotization as well, in that original signs are altered in various ways, generically germane—a kind of ‘substrate’ recognizability would be maintained—but situationally adjusted and altered so as to produce very different communicative effects. Memes tend to have an extraordinary level of semiotic productivity which involves very different kinds of semiotic activity—genres, in other words.

Let us consider figures 2-4, and 5-7. In figure 2 we see the origin of a



successful meme, a British World War II propaganda poster.

A virtually endless range of resemiotized versions of this poster have gone viral since the year 2000. They can be identified as intertextually related by the speech act structure of the message (an adhortative ‘keep calm’ or similar statements, followed by a subordinate adhortative) and the graphic features of lettering and layout (larger fonts for the adhortatives, the use of a coat of arms-like image). Variations on the memic theme range from minimal to maximal, but the generic template is constant. Figure 3 shows a minimally resemiotized variant in which lettering and coat of arms (the royal crown) are kept, while in figure 4,

the royal crown has been replaced by a beer mug.

In figures 2, 3, and 4 we see how one set of affordances—the visual architecture of the sign and its speech act format—becomes the intertextual link enabling the infinite resemiotizations while retaining the original semiotic pointer: most users of variants of the meme would know that the variants derive from the same ‘original’ meme. The visual architecture and speech act format of the ‘original’, thus, are the ‘mobile’ elements in memicity here: they provide memic-intertextual recognisability, while the textual adjustments redirect the meme towards more specific audiences and reset it in different frames of meaning and use.

Figure 2: British wartime propaganda poster

Figure 3: Keep calm and call Batman

See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/keep-calm-and-carry-on for figures 2-4



The opposite can also apply, certainly when memes are widely known because of textual-stylistic features: the actual ways in which ‘languaging’ is performed through fixed expressions and speech characteristics. A particularly successful example of such textual-stylistic memicity is so-called ‘lolspeak’, the particular pidginized English originally associated with funny images of cats (‘lolcats’), but extremely mobile as a memic resource in its own right. Consider figures 5, 6, and 7. Figure 5 documents the origin of this spectacularly successful meme: a picture of a cat, to which the caption ‘I can has cheezburger?’ was added, went viral in 2007 via a website ‘I can has cheezburger?’. The particular caption phrase went viral as well and became tagged to a wide variety of other images – see figure 6. The caption, then, quickly became the basis for a particular pidginized variety of written English, which could in turn be deployed in a

broad range of contexts (see figure 7). The extraordinary productivity of this meme-turned-language-variety was demonstrated in 2010, when a team of ‘lolspeak’ authors completed an online translation of the entire Bible in their self-constructed language variety. The Lolcat Bible can now also be purchased as a book.

The different resources that enter into the production of such memes can also turn out to be memic in themselves. People, as we said, are extraordinarily creative in reorganizing, redirecting, and applying memic resources over a vast range of thematic domains, addressing a vast range of audiences while all the same retaining clear and recognizable intertextual links to the original memic sources. This fundamental intertextuality allows for combined memes, in which features of different established memes are blended in a ‘mashup’ meme. Figure 8 shows such a mashup meme.

Figure 4: Keep calm and drink beer Figure 5: I can has cheezburger? See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/

sites/cheezburger



Figure 6: President and a possible voter having cheezburger. See http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2008/04/18/barack-obama-yes-you-can/.

Figure 7: I has a dream. See http://memebase.cheezburger.com/puns/tag/martin-luther-king-jr.



We see the familiar template of the ‘Keep calm’ meme, to which a recognizable reference to another meme is added. The origin of this other meme, ‘then I took an arrow in the knee’, is in itself worthy of reflection, for it shows the essentially arbitrary nature of memic success. The phrase was originally uttered by characters in the video game ‘Skyrim’ (figure 9). The phrase is quite often repeated throughout the game, but this does not in itself offer an explanation for the viral spread of the expression way beyond the community of Skyrim gamers.

The phrase became wildly productive and can now be tagged to an almost infinite range of different expressions, each time retaining a tinge of its original apologetic character, and appearing in mashups, as we saw in figure 8.

What we see in each of these examples is how memes operate via a combination of intertextual recognizability and individual

creativity—individual users adding an ‘accent’ to existing viral memes, in attempts to go viral with their own adapted version. The work of resemiotization involved in such processes can be complex and demanding. Mashup memes, for instance, involves elaborate knowledge of existing memes, an understanding of the affordances and limitations for altering the memes, and graphic, semiotic, and technological skills to post them online. The different forms of resemiotization represent different genres of communicative action, ranging from maximally transparent refocusing of existing memes to the creation of very different and new memes, less densely connected to existing ones.

Two points need to be made now. First, we do not see such resemiotizations, even drastic and radical ones, as being fundamentally different from the ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ we discussed in the previous section. We have seen that ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are already different genres characterized by very different activity patterns, orientations

Figure 8: Keep calm and remove the arrow from your kneeSee https://www.facebook.com/pages/Keep-Calm-and-remove-the-arrow-from-your-

knee/254461191300457.



to addressees and audiences, and degrees of intervention in the original signs. The procedures we have reviewed here differ in degree but not in substance: they are, like ‘retweets’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, re-entextualizations of existing signs, i.e. meaningful communicative operations that demand different levels of agency and creativity of the user. Second, and related to this, the nature of the original sign itself—its conventionally understood ‘meaning’—appears to be less relevant than the capacity to deploy it in largely phatic, relational forms of interaction. This again, ranges from what Malinowski described as ‘communion’—ritually expressing membership of a particular community—to ‘communication’ within the communities we described as held together by ‘ambient affiliation’. ‘Meaning’ in its traditional sense needs to give way here to a more general notion of ‘function’. Memes, just like Mark Zuckerberg’s status updates, do not need to

be read in order to be seen and understood as denotationally and informationally meaningful; their use and re-use appear to be governed by the ‘phatic’ and ‘emblematic’ functions often seen as of secondary nature in discourse-analytic literature.

4. Conviviality on demandBut what explains the immense density of such phatic forms of practice on social media? How do we make sense of the astonishing speed and scope with which such phatic forms of communion and communication circulate, creating—like in the case of Gangnam Style—perhaps the largest-scale collective communicative phenomena in human history? The explanations, we hope to have shown, do not necessarily have to be located in the features of the signs themselves, nor in the specific practices they prompt—both are unspectacular. So

Figure 9: Skyrim scene ‘Then I took an arrow in the knee’. See http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an-arrow-in-the-knee.



perhaps the explanations must be sought in the social world in which these phatic practices make sense.

In a seminal paper, Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2010: 120) distinguish between email and Twitter. They have this to say on the topic:

(…) the difference between Twitter and email is that the latter is primarily a directed technology with people pushing content to persons listed in the ‘To:’ field, while tweets are made available for interested individuals to pull on demand. The typical email has an articulated audience, while the typical tweet does not.

The statement demands nuancing, for we have seen that even minimal forms of activity such as ‘sharing’ involve degrees of audience design—the seemingly vacuous identity statements we described above, lodged in social media practices, are always directed at some audience, of which users have some idea, right or wrong (cf. Androutsopoulos 2013). Imaginary audiences are powerful actors affecting discursive behaviour, as Goffman and others have shown so often (e.g. Goffman 1963), and Marwick and boyd’s early statement that ‘Twitter flattens multiple audiences into one’—a phenomenon they qualify as ‘context collapse’—is surely in need of qualification (Marwick and boyd 2010: 122). The intricate social-semiotic work we have described here certainly indicates users having diverse understandings of audiences on social media. Different social media platforms offer opportunities for different types of semiotic and identity work and users often hold very precise and detailed views of what specific platforms offer them in the way of audience access, identity and communication opportunities, and effects (cf. Gershon 2010).

At the same time, Marwick and boyd are correct in directing our attention towards the kinds of communities in which people move on social media. In spite of precise ideas of specific target audiences and addressees, it is certainly true that there is no way in which absolute certainty about the identities (and numbers) of addressees can be ascertained on most social media platforms—something which Edward Snowden also made painfully clear. In addition, it is true that lump categories such as Facebook ‘friends’ gather a range of—usually never explicitly defined—subcategories ranging from ‘offline friends’ and close relatives to what we may best call, following Goffman again, ‘acquaintances’. Goffman (1963), as we know, described acquaintances as that broad category of people within the network of US middle class citizens with whom relations of sociality and civility need to be maintained. Avoidance of overt neglect and rejection are narrowly connected to avoidance of intimacy and ‘transgressive’ personal interaction: what needs to be maintained with such people is a relationship of conviviality—a level of social intercourse characterized by largely ‘phatic’ and ‘polite’ engagement in interaction. Acquaintances are not there to be ‘loved’, they are there to be ‘liked’. Facebook is made exactly for these kinds of social relationships (van Dijck 2013), which is perhaps also why a discourse analysis of Facebook interaction reveals the overwhelming dominance of the Gricean Maxims, that old ethnotheory of ‘polite’ US bourgeois interaction (Varis forthcoming).

But let us delve slightly deeper into this. The communities present as audiences on social media may be at once over-imagined and under-determined: while users can have relatively precise ideas of who it is they are addressing, a level of indeterminacy is inevitable in



reality. This means, in analysis, that we cannot treat such communities in the traditional sense of ‘speech community’ as a group of people tied together by clear and generally shareable rules of the indexical value and function of signs (Agha 2007). Indexical orders need to be built, as a consequence, since they cannot readily be presupposed. Virality, as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, might be seen as moments at which such indexical orders—perceived shareability of meaningful signs—are taking shape. The two billion views of Gangnam Style suggest that large numbers of people in various places on earth recognized something in the video; what it is exactly they experienced as recognizable is hard to determine and research on this topic—how virality might inform us on emergent forms of social and cultural normativity in new and unclear large globalized human collectives—is long overdue.

Some suggestions in this direction can be offered, though. In earlier work, we tried to describe ephemeral forms of community formation in the online-offline contemporary world as ‘focused but diverse’ (Blommaert and Varis 2013). Brief moments of focusing on perceived recognizable and shareable features of social activity generate temporary groups—think of the thousands who ‘liked’ Zuckerberg’s status update—while such groups do not require the kinds of strong and lasting bonds grounded in shared bodies of knowledge we associate with more traditionally conceived ‘communities’ or ‘societies’. In fact, they are groups selected on demand, so to speak, by individual users in the ways we discussed earlier. People can focus and re-focus perpetually, and do so (which explains the speed of virality) without being tied into a community of fixed circumscription, given the absence of the deep and strong bonds that tie them

together, and the absence of temporal and spatial co-presence that characterizes online groups (cf. Maly and Varis forthcoming on ‘micro-populations’).

A joint ‘phatic’ focus on recognizable form or shape offers possibilities for such processes of groupness, while the actual functional appropriation and deployment of signs—what they actually mean for actual users—is hugely diverse; the infinite productivity of memes—the perpetual construction of memic ‘accents’—illustrates this. Here we begin to see something fundamental about communities in an online age—the joint focusing, even if ‘phatic’, is in itself not trivial: it creates a structural level of conviviality, i.e. a sharing at one level of meaningful interaction by means of a joint feature, which in superficial but real ways translates a number of individuals into a focused collective. Note, and we repeat, that what this collective shares is the sheer act of phatic communion (the ‘sharing’ itself, so to speak), while the precise meaning of this practice for each individual member of the collective is impossible to determine. But since Malinowski and Goffman, we have learned not to underestimate the importance of (seemingly) unimportant social activities. Memes force us to think about levels of social structuring that we very often overlook because we consider them meaningless.

This neglect of conviviality has effects. In the superdiversity that characterizes online-offline social worlds, we easily tend to focus on differences and downplay the level of social structuring that actually prevents these differences from turning into conflicts. Recognizing such hitherto neglected levels of social structuring might also serve as a corrective to rapid qualifications of the present era as being ‘postsocial’—a point on which we disagree with Vincent Miller.



There is a great deal of sociality taking place on social media, but this sociality might require a new kind of sociological imagination. We will look in vain for communities and societies that resemble the ones proposed by Durkheim and Parsons. But that does not mean that such units are not present, and even less that they are not in need of description.

REFERENCESAgha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social

Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2013. Networked multilingualism: Some language practices on Facebook and their implications. International Journal of Bilingualism 0 (0): 1-21.

Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.

Blommaert, Jan and Piia Varis. 2013. Life projects. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Paper 58. <https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/c37dcccf-242d-4fca-b79f-d3d366b0a505_TPCS_58_Blommaert-Varis.pdf>

Briggs, Charles. 1997. Introduction: From the ideal, the ordinary, and the orderly to conflict and violence in pragmatic research. Pragmatics 7 (4) (special issue on Conflict and Violence in Pragmatic Research, ed. Charles Briggs): 451-459.

Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Dijck, José. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gershon, Ilana. 2010. Breakup 2.0. Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. New York: The Free Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-face Behavior. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

Hymes, Dell. 1972/1986. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In John Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. London: Blackwell. 35-71.

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas Sebeok (ed). Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press. 350-377.

Lange, Patricia G. 2009. Videos of affinity on YouTube. In Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds). The YouTube Reader. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. 70-88.

Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen and Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (eds). The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 112-136.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923/1936. The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (eds). The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul. 296-336.

Maly, Ico and Piia Varis. Forthcoming. The 21st-century hipster: On micro-populations in times of superdiversity. European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Marwick, Alice E. and danah boyd. 2010. I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society 13 (1): 114-133.

Miller, Vincent. 2008. New media, networking and phatic culture. Convergence 14: 387-400.

Schegloff, Emanuel. 1972/1986. Sequencing in conversational openings. In John Gumperz and Dell Hymes (eds). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. London: Blackwell. 346-380.

Schegloff, Emanuel. 1988. Goffman and the analysis of conversation. In Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds). Erving



Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Oxford: Polity Press. 89-135.

Schegloff, Emanuel and Harvey Sacks. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 8: 289-327.

Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge.

Senft, Gunter. 1995. Phatic communion. In Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert (eds). Handbook of Pragmatics 1995. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1-10.

Shifman, Limor. 2011. An anatomy of a YouTube meme. New Media & Society 14 (2): 187-203.

Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Varis, Piia. forthcoming. Facebook and the Gricean maxims.

Zappavigna, Michele. 2011. Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media & Society 13 (5): 788-806.

46

Common ground and conviviality: Indonesians doing togetherness in

Japan1

Zane GoebelLa Trobe University/Tilburg University

AbstractWhile Humanities and Social Science scholars have a long history of trying to understand how people from different backgrounds get along (i.e. to be convivial), typically this work misses much of the work carried out in sociolinguistics and related areas. In building upon work on common ground, small talk, and conviviality, this paper examines how a group of Indonesian students living in Japan go about practicing conviviality. I show how repetition and tiny response tokens are used to build common ground. I argue that this practice is key to building convivial relations amongst this group and that this type of interactional work helps open the possibility of future interactions, some of which are tied with the need to build and maintain support networks in Japan.

Keywords: conviviality; common ground; Indonesia; Japan; talk

1. INTRODUCTION

Anthropologists, Sociologists, and Cultural Studies scholars have a long

history of seeking to understand how people from diverse backgrounds go about getting along (e.g. Werbner 1997; Ang 2003; Brettell 2003; Vertovec 2007; Wise 2009). While recent work in this area continues to highlight the importance of everyday interaction in the building of convivial relations (Thrift 2005; Landau and Freemantle 2009; Wise 2009; Karner and Parker 2010; Bunnell et al. 2012; Amin 2013), bar Williams and Stroud’s (2013) work on public performances of conviviality, the majority of these studies do not focus on everyday talk and indeed seem to have missed work on these issues in the field of sociolinguistics (e.g. Gumperz

1982; Tannen 1984; Rampton 1995; Ryoo 2005).

Early anthropological work on reciprocity (e.g. Malinowski 1996 [1922]; Mauss 1966 [1925]) and later work by Goffman (1971) laid much of the groundwork for the study of conviviality. Goffman (1971), for example, showed how reciprocity related to all sorts of semiotic exchanges and social relations. Since this work, the interactional practices that build and maintain social relations have been investigated from the standpoint of ‘common ground’ (Enfield 2006) or ‘small talk’ (Coupland 2000, 2003). In the current paper I seek to synthesize these areas by examining how conviviality is built through talk among sojourning Indonesian students. I will argue that the

© Goebel and CMDR. 2015


47Common ground and conviviality


use of small response tokens, repetition, and teasing all build and reproduce common ground and ultimately convivial social relations. Practicing conviviality is important for this group of sojourning Indonesians because it helps ensure access to important resources and information. In what follows I cover some of the earlier work on conviviality (Section 2), before then introducing the study and the participants (Section 3). I then analyze participants’ talk in a television viewing session (Section 4) and an interview (Section 5).

2. RECIPROCITY, CONVIVIALITY, AND COMMON GROUNDSince Malinowski’s (1996 [1922]) and Mauss’ (1966 [1925]) classic works, reciprocity has become an important concept in anthropology, especially the idea that reciprocity is key to the building and maintenance of social relations. In one of his many opuses, Goffman (1971) argued that most human interaction involves reciprocity of one form or another.

[I]nterpersonal rituals have a dialogistic character, and this differently impinges on positive and negative rites. When a ritual offering occurs, when, that is, one individual provides a sign of involvement in and connectedness to another, it behooves the recipient to show that the message has been received, that its import has been appreciated, that the affirmed relationship actually exists as the performer implies, that the performer himself has worth as a person, and finally, that the recipient has an appreciative, grateful nature. Prestation (to use Mauss’ favorite term) thus leads to counter-prestation, and when we focus on minor rituals performed between persons who are present to

each other, the giving statement tends to be followed immediately by a show of gratitude. (Goffman 1971: 63-64)

The continued importance of reciprocity in anthropology can be seen in Wise’s (2009) work, which focuses upon the giving and receiving of food, offers of assistance, recipes, lessons, and does so across lines of difference. In this work Wise (2009) suggests that through this type of reciprocal practice participants are building convivial relations by displaying mutual recognition of the other. If we look at some of the work on small talk, we also see that reciprocity seems to be an underlying feature of displays of recognition.

Studies of small talk show that recognition is done through the giving and receiving of compliments, the exchange of a joke for laughter (Ryoo 2005), repetition (Tannen 1989), the pursuit of sameness in states of being (Ryoo 2005), teasing (Strachle 1993), the use of response tokens (McCarthy 2003), and so on. McCarthy’s (2003) work, for example, shows how a single response token (e.g. ‘yes’) indexes hearership, while the use of additional response tokens (e.g. ‘yes, yes, heem’) can index engaged listening, which is a type of conviviality. The use of additional response tokens is referred to as ‘non-minimal response’ (McCarthy 2003).

The use of non-minimal responses are part of a larger set of interactional practices referred to as repetition and the social pursuit of sameness (Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Lempert 2014), all of which help establish and maintain convivial relations. While there are many types of repetition, including memicity which involve replication of some elements and the addition of some new elements (discussed in the paper by Varis and Blommaert), this paper is more interested in replication-as-precise copy in conversation, and how this

48 GOEBEL


figures in the building and maintaining of social relations. As Tannen (1989), Berman (1998), Bjork-Willen (2007), and others have shown, repetition of others’ words, utterances or embodied practices can index and produce positive interpersonal social relations. When interactants know little about each other, repetition can show that you have similar linguistic repertoires, dispositions, opinions, and so on. As a form of linguistic reciprocity, repetition may not only provide interactional recognition of the other, but also tacit approval of their ways of speaking, while also establishing common ground on which future interactions can be based (Enfield 2006). Enfield (2006: 422) defines common ground as ‘knowledge openly shared by specific pairs, trios, and so forth’. Common ground is achieved through participants’ ability to jointly agree on referents in interaction (Enfield 2006; Hanks 2006).

The interactional pursuit of common ground establishes convivial relations, while setting up a type of infrastructure for future social interaction (Goffman 1971). As Blommaert (2013) points out, these types of infrastructures are important to mobile persons who often do not have access to formal channels of help such as banking, schooling, and housing. In settings inhabited by mobile persons, the pursuit of conviviality is necessary for accessing information about housing options, employment options, the cheapest or best shops, and so on (Wise 2009; Bunnell et al. 2012; Blommaert 2013). In what follows, I look at the forms conviviality takes in talk amongst a group of sojourning Indonesian students. In doing so, these typically small and often minute orienting practices help conversationalists construct certain identities for themselves and others (Antaki and Widdicombe 1998), though as we learn more about identity in interaction it seems clear that identities

are always emergent and produced over a series of speech events (Wortham 2006).

3. METHODS AND PARTICIPANTSMy data is drawn from recordings of talk that were made as part of a larger study conducted in Japan2. This study examined how Indonesians interpreted and talked about televised soap operas. These Indonesians were all from a highly mobile middle-income population. They were primarily graduate students and/or the spouses of graduate students studying at a university in Nagoya. While this group of Indonesians clearly fit into what is essentially middle-class Indonesia, nevertheless like many post-graduate students across the world they were not wealthy and lived very frugal lives whilst in Nagoya. Typically their scholarships were small by Japanese standards, with most taking on part-time jobs to support themselves and their families.

As I became part of the Indonesian network in Nagoya, because of my long-term interest in Indonesia and also because of my Indonesian spouse, I learned that most of these Indonesian students lived in the old, yet-to-be-made earthquake proof, public housing located in the outer fringes of Nagoya. In many ways a comfortable life in Nagoya was made possible through the support networks that had emerged through their own efforts and through their predecessors’ efforts. One such network was the Nagoya branch of the Indonesian Student Union of Japan (PPI Japan).

This network provided: lists of people who knew Japanese; lists of people who knew the cheapest places to buy furniture, clothes, appliances; information about where and when



houses may become vacant and how to work with (or around) bureaucracy to ensure you had a place to live. The setting where this research was conducted—in a room located within a building that housed the Saturday school for the children of Indonesian sojourners—was one of the hubs of this network. While some participants either had children in this school or were involved in the running of the school, others were part of the Nagoya Indonesian community who would come together on Saturdays to exchange information (e.g. about accommodation, food, clothing, upcoming gatherings), to organize the settling in or return preparations for sojourners, the organization of national and religious celebrations, and to share food or to do the evening prayer together in the case of Muslim Indonesians.

Seventeen Indonesians voluntarily responded to an advertisement seeking participants for this study. Given what we know about the ubiquitousness of communal viewing practices in Indonesia (Hobart 2001; Nilan 2001; Rachmah 2006; Goebel 2010), and with the help of a couple of Indonesian research assistants, we divided respondents into viewing groups of four to five people and invited them to attend four viewing and interview sessions over four weeks. Each viewing session lasted between one to two hours. Typically, sessions started with some informal chatting with participants about the research project, about participants’ backgrounds, and about local events. Following this, a comedic soap opera or a film was screened. These screenings were audio and video-taped. After the screening, I interviewed participants using a mixture of pre-devised questions and questions that had arisen as a result of participants’ talk during the viewing session. What I will present in my analysis is the talk that

occurred between participants during the first viewing session. A summary of participant backgrounds is presented in table 3.1 (all names are pseudonyms).

This group of participants consisted of five people, me, and an Indonesian research assistant. As can be seen in table 3.1 most participants were highly multilingual. With the exception of Desi and my research assistant, they were also rather mobile. Participants were of similar age (except Lina), and were highly educated. Diagram 3.1 shows where each participant was seated. All of these participants knew each other to varying degrees through their interaction within the Indonesian community in Nagoya. Slamet and Lina, a husband and wife couple, had only recently arrived in Japan and were not well acquainted with the other participants who had all lived in Nagoya for a number of years. While the methods used here differed from those used in much of the work on small talk and other studies of social relations, this context offers a number of opportunities to focus on how people do conviviality through talk. Despite the artificial context, this group still needed to build and/or reproduce interpersonal relations because of their need to continue to access the support networks described earlier. This helps explain why these participants continued to attend these viewing sessions over the six-week period that they ran, rather than not attending after the first session.

Before looking at this talk I want to provide some background information about the comedic soap which this group of Indonesians watched and talked about. The episode they watched was titled Cipoa (‘Con artist’). It was part of the series Noné (‘Young Miss’) that was broadcast nationally in 1995 during the mid-afternoon time slot on the commercial, semi-educational

50 GOEBEL


television station TPI. This particular comedic soap is notable because of some characters’ frequent alternation between Indonesian and linguistic fragments stereotypically associated with a regional language, Sundanese, and because of the representation of other signs that anchored the linguistic signs and the story geographically to West Java, an area associated with an imagined community of Sundanese speakers.

4. SMALL RESPONSE TOKENS AND CONVIVIALITYThroughout the viewing of this soap opera the use of small response tokens and repetition figured in the building and reproduction of common ground and convivial relations. As we will see, participants’ ponderings over the meaning of a particular word, cipoa,

Table 3.1 Participant backgrounds

Name Age History of mobility Education Language ability

Years PlaceDesi (S) 35 27

35

BandungSoloJapan

MA IndonesianSundaneseJapaneseEnglish

Lina 23 83911.50.5

Pekan BaruJakartaPadangJapanPadangJapan

BA IndonesianJapanese

Slamet 33 2150.5240.5

IrianBandungJakartaJapanPadangJapan

MA Javanese IndonesianEnglish

Gun (S) 37 19648

CirebonBandungJakartaJapan

PHD Javanese SundaneseIndonesian Japanese English

RA 39 27102

SoloJakartaJapan

BA JavaneseIndonesianJapanese

Me 41 353.50.52

AustraliaSemarangCirebonJapan

PHD IndonesianJavaneseSundaneseEnglish



became central to this process and to the identification of participants as being of a particular ethnolinguistic background. The first extract of talk that I analyze occurs after an elderly woman has narrated a letter that is being read by the main character, Dewi, and after a series of images that show a house situated within expansive grounds. (As the analysis proceeds I will introduce the transcription conventions). The import of this extract is how participants establish common ground and then move from demonstrating co-presence to engaged listening through non-minimal responses.

About a minute after seeing the images of the house and yard, we see that the topic of residence is ratified by three participants through repetitions (indicated by an underline) of vila (‘villa’) and its rephrasing as rumah (‘house’) on lines 1–3. In engaging in repetition (or the reciprocal exchange of linguistic forms), each participant is also showing the other that they recognize the referent (villa) and thus also begin to start sharing common ground. We also see that on lines 3 and 6, Desi notes that the house is like those of the type found

in Kuningan (an area located in West Java). The repetition that occurs on lines 1–3 and 6 shows how hearership and common ground is established, while Gun’s non-minimal response on line 7 shows that he has not only recognized the referent (Kuningan) and is listening to Desi with his first ‘heem’ but that the ya gitu repeats this information in a way that suggests ‘engaged listening’.

While the establishment of common ground and a non-minimal response suggest a reproduction of convivial relations, we need to see how the interaction proceeds. (For this pair I use ‘reproduction’ rather than ‘build’ because these two participants know each other through engagement in Indonesian community activities over the previous two years, though as we will see they are uncertain about whether they are members of the same ethnic community). Following the talk in extract 4.1, participants do not say much until the first advertisement break that occurs nearly ten minutes later. Some of the signs that these participants have access to before their next extended conversation include: a taxi, which drives into the driveway of Dewi’s newly acquired house; and the exchanges

Diagram 3.1: Placement of participants relative to recording devices

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Gun (S)1 vila ya (1.0) vilanya si nike (1.0) It’s a villa yeah? Its Nike’s villa.Slamet 2 vila (0.8) [Yes] a Villa.Desi (S)3 kaya rumah di kuningan [ laughs Like houses in Kuningan.All4 [ (laugh) = (Laugh).Desi (S)56 = kuningan sih (??? ???) = [In?] Kuningan (??? ???)

Gun (S)7 = heem . ya:: gitu. Heem, yeah like that.

Extract 4.1 From hearership to engaged listening and transcription key

Transcription key:

plain font Indicates forms stereotypically associated with Indonesian.

bold italic Small caps Indicates forms stereotypically associated with Japanese.

. between words Indicates a perceivable silence.

Brackets with a number (.4) Indicates length of silence in tenths of a second.

= Indicates no perceivable pause between speaker turns.

[ Indicates start of overlapping talk.

‘ after a word Indicates final falling intonation.

? after a word Indicates final rising intonation.

+ surrounding an utterance/word Indicates raising of volume.

A hash # surrounding an utterance/word Indicates lowering of volume.

> at the start and end of an utterance Indicates utterance spoken faster than previous one.

< at the start and end of an utterance Indicates utterance spoken slower than previous one.

: within a word Indicates sound stretch.

CAPS Indicates stress.

Brackets with three ?, i.e. (???) Indicates word that could not be transcribed.

In extract words inside ( ) Indicates a multimodal description.

In English gloss words inside [ ] Indicates implied talk or words used to make the gloss readable.

In English gloss words inside (( )) Indicates implied background knowledge.

underline Indicates the repetition of words or utterances between adjacency pairs.

broken underline Indicates that the word or utterance was repeated in prior talk, although it may not always be in the immediately preceding turn.



Desi (S)12

apa sih . judulnya . +judulnya apa sih . judulnya apa sih+ =

So what is the title? So what is the title? So what is the title?

Lina34 = apa tadi judulnya = What was the title earlier?

Research Assistant5 = ci . cipoa = Ci, Cipoa.Desi (S)6 = +judulnya+ = The title.Me7 = cipoa = Cipoa.Research Assistant89 = cipoa = Cipoa.

Desi (S)10 = cipoa itu apa ya (0.7) What is [the meaning of] Cipoa?Gun (S)111213

itu (while turning gaze toward Desi and smiling) bukan bahasa sunda bukan =

That isn’t Sundanese is it?

Desi (S)141516

= (while moving body forward and turning gaze towards Gun) ya apa sih (0.6) cipoa itu (0.5)

Yeah so what does this [potentially Sundanese] term Cipoa mean?

Slamet17 nggak tahu = [I] don’t know.Desi (S)18 = pak gun = Mr.3 Gun?Gun (S)1920 = nggak tahu (artinya?) cipoa . cipoa = [I] don’t know (the meaning?) of cipoa,

cipoa.Desi (S)21 = (laughs)(2.3) Laughs.

Extract 4.2 From engaged listening to discourses of sameness

that follow between the taxi driver and the passenger (Susi), Susi and Dewi, and Dewi and the taxi driver. These signs may or may not disambiguate earlier signs about setting. For example, at the bottom of the driver’s door of the taxi there is the text ‘Bandung Taxi company’ and the taxi also has a number plate which is prefixed

with the letter ‘D’. For those who see these signs, they may recognize them as pointing to a setting in West Java, in particular, the capital city of Bandung. There are also marked contrasts in linguistic signs exchanged in interactions between different participant pairs. For example, in the speech event involving Dewi and

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Susi, they exchange linguistic forms stereotypically associated with Indonesian. In contrast, in the interaction between Dewi and the taxi driver, which immediately follows, participants exchange many forms stereotypically associated with Sundanese, together with embodied ways of speaking not used in the earlier interaction. Shortly thereafter, there are some brief exchanges between Susi and Ucup, Dewi and Ucup, and finally an advertisement before the participants in the viewing session start to talk again (extract 4.2). The importance of this interaction lays in the continued use of non-minimal responses and the pursuit of social sameness, in this case ethnic sameness.

In this interaction there is the continued use of repetition which helps participants align with each other on a number of topics, while also establishing further common ground (e.g. the title of the serial on lines 1–9, and the meaning of the word cipoa on lines 10–20). We also see that Gun’s use of features that seem to index ‘engaged listening’ when speaking with Desi earlier (extract 4.1, line 7), are reciprocated through the emergence of a type of discourse of ethnic sameness between Desi and Gun. In particular, we see that while Gun’s gaze direction and question left some ambiguity as to whether the question was addressed to the group or someone who he thought knew Sundanese (lines 11–13), nevertheless we see that Desi self-selects suggesting that she was the target of the question. In doing so, she moves her body in a way that she can see around Lina and Slamet to look at Gun and ask again what is the meaning of this potentially Sundanese term (lines 14–15). In asking Desi about provenance (lines 11–13), Gun appears to be saying ‘you are Sundanese and may know’ while also implying ‘you are of the same ethnolinguistic background as me’. In short, here participants are engaged

in reciprocating acknowledgements of the other’s ethnic identity. Taking a sequential view it also appears that Desi ratifies this categorization by checking whether Gun—as against Slamet and Lina who she looks around—can provide a meaning for the term (lines 14–16 and 18).

While the meaning of word cipoa initially appeared to be unknown to participants, now and in this context it starts to gain a potential shared meaning (i.e. common ground about its Sundanese provenance). However, apart from the earlier mention of place (Kuningan) we are unsure what triggers a potential ethnolinguistic meaning for Gun (line 11) and Desi (lines 15–16 and 18), but we can suggest that it may have been the agreed upon potential West Java setting (extract 4.1), and/or the Sundanese usage in the interaction between the characters. In short, they seem to share some common ground where ideas of Sundaneseness are concerned.

While the social domain of cipoa as having an ethnolinguistic meaning appears to be only as wide as Gun and Desi, this topic will be revisited a number of times and by other participants throughout the viewing session and the interview, thus establishing further common ground between participants. This search for meaning continues to be tied with the ethnolinguistic identification of participants. Repetition also becomes important in other ways, especially as Slamet repeats Gun’s and Desi’s utterance about the provenance of the term cipoa. I suggest that the repetition in extract 4.3 needs to be seen as highlighting a move between a focus on the literal meaning of the word cipoa to one where the pursuit of conviviality is fronted through agreements on its meaning. This talk follows directly on from that represented in extract 4.2.



In the above talk we can see that repetition continues to function as a way of establishing reference, topic, and common ground (lines 30 to 34). Just as importantly, we also see that although the topic of provenance has been established by Gun and Desi (lines 30–32), Slamet also repeats this information (lines 33–34). This informational redundancy suggests that repetition is doing something else. As with my earlier interpretations of a non-minimal response (extract 4.1) and discourses of sameness (extract 4.2), this repetition appears to be part of ongoing relationship building efforts, this time on the part of Slamet, who can be seen to be aligning with both Gun and Desi. On lines 35–36 we also see that Desi repeats, via her agreement (saya kira), the earlier series of repetitions involving herself, Gun, and Slamet (lines 30–34). This suggests she is reciprocating Slamet’s interpersonal relationship work.

It is also interesting to note that in addition to repetition between utterances, we also now start to see repetition that does not always immediately follow a preceding turn: that is, it is temporally distant. These instances are indicated by a broken underline. For example, although Desi uses some Japanese (e.g. the use of ‘eh’ on line 27 that is in bold italic small caps), her whole utterance repeats what Gun said in extract 4.2 on lines 11–13. This repetition also appears to be part of ongoing efforts on the part of Desi and Gun to align with each other’s stances toward the meaning of the word cipoa. In so doing, their alignment solidifies some common ground between them, while adding to their earlier pursuits of social sameness; this time sameness in their evaluations of provenance. Just as importantly, this repetition also again foregrounds Desi’s claims as someone who is entitled or able to evaluate what is Sundanese and

what is not. In doing this, she further strengthens the ethnolinguistic identity claims that she made in extract 4.2. In this case, something like: ‘I can evaluate this term’s provenance because I am Sundanese’. In so doing, she continues to engage in the pursuit of social sameness by implying that she is also of the same ethnicity as Gun.

After the talk represented in extract 4.3 there is no more extended conversation about the word cipoa until the end of the serial. Before looking at this talk, I want to take a look at one of the few large chunks of talk that occur amongst this group before the serial ends (extract 4.4). This piece of talk is interesting because in addition to the building of common ground and the use of non-minimal responses, teasing is also used for building and reproducing convivial relations amongst several of the participants. This talk is preceded by talk about the actors’ spouses.

In this interaction we can see participants showing that they share some common ground and are thus the same at some level. In particular, we see that after Desi mentions the actress’s name on line 3 (Dian Nitami), both Gun and Slamet demonstrate that they share some knowledge about this actress and her spouse (lines 4 and 11). As in previous talk there are also instances of non-minimal responses. The first instance of a non-minimal response is that found on line 6 where Desi answers Gun’s question (line 4) with three ‘yes’ responses. The first seems to be a response signaling hearership, while the second iya huuh, although appearing redundant, may in fact be signaling ‘engaged listening’. Similarly, while both Desi and Slamet answer Gun’s question about whether the actress playing Ayu is already divorced on lines 8-11, we also see that on line 14 Desi rephrases her answer. This answer

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repeats what has already been said (awet awet which literally means ‘to last long’, but here meaning something like ‘still together’). In so doing, her talk is again more than required and invites

us to interpret this type of repetition as helping build convivial relations, this time with Slamet, who has aligned with Desi on the question of whether the actor is divorced or not.

Me22 tukang bohong apa = Is it con artist?Research Assistant23 = tukang bohong = Con artist.Me2425 = tukang bohong kayanya = Maybe it’s like con artist.

Desi (S)2627 = +bahasa sunda?+ (0.8) e::h? = Is it Sundanese?

Really Me2829 = kurang tahu saya (1.0) I’m not sure.

Gun (S)3031

mungkin bandung mungkin ya . daerah daerah sunda gitu’ .

Maybe it’s Bandung, maybe. A Sundanese area, yeah.

Desi (S)32 [ kayanya nama daerah ya Yeah, it’s like a place name.Slamet3334

[ setingnya bandung itu . setingnya (2.0) bisa nama daerah juga ya =

The setting is Bandung, the setting. It can be a place name yeah.

Desi (S)3536 = saya kira = I

think so.Slamet37 = cipoa = Cipoa.Desi (S)38 = heeh (0.7) Yeah.Slamet39 (??? ???) =Research Assistant40 = nama daerah itu pak . It’s a place name Mr. [Zane].Me41 oh nama daerah . ya . Oh a place name, yeah.Desi (S)42 nggak tau tuh I don’t know.

Extract 4.3 Repetition and the linking of language with place



Gun12

ini namanya siapa (glancing toward Desi) =

What’s her name?

Desi3 = dian nitami (0.8) Dian Nitami.Gun4 (???) (4.4) suaminya anajsmara nih = (???) she is Anajsmara’s husband,

yeah?Desi56

= iya . >iya huuh> (0.5) dian nitami (7.6) Yeah, yes, yes, Dian Nitami.

Gun7 tapi udah itu kan . udah cerai ini = But [they] are already, already

divorced, right?Desi8910

= (looking toward Gun) e:h . ngga::k . [ masih

What? No [they] are still [together].

Slamet11 [(looking toward Gun) nggak = No.Gun1213

= (looks toward Desi) eh masih [ (laughs) Oh still [together].

Desi1415

[ awet . awet (0.4) Still together, still together.

Slamet1617

(after glancing away looks back at Gun) jangan bikin gosip pak = Don’t spread gossip Pak [Gun].

Gun1819

= (looks at Slamet) +hehehe+ [ heheLaughs.

Slamet20 [ hehehehe Laughs.

Extract 4.4 Teasing and conviviality

We also see that although Desi aligns with Slamet, Slamet is also quick to try and build convivial relations with Gun by teasingly accusing him of spreading gossip (lines 16–17). The tease touches on multiple ideologies about gossip and piousness. For example, Gun arrived a little earlier than the other participants and was finishing his afternoon prayer as

other participants arrived. Performing his prayers indexed not only his Islamic identity but his piety insofar as praying is being pious. Engaging in gossip, which is categorized as sinful, is thus part of the joke. The other part is that while gossip can often be meant to reach the person being gossiped about (Besnier 2009), in this setting the people being gossiped

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about would be very unlikely to hear this gossip. Gun appears to orient to this joke through his loud laughter (indicated by a ‘+’ surrounding the hehe) and his gaze (lines 18–19). Again, given that this sequence is not informational, it seems to invite an interpretation of another local strategy for producing convivial relations.

After this sequence participants do not say much until the end of the serial when Dewi’s grandmother makes her fourth and final appearance to warn Dewi about con artists. At this stage one of the viewers, Slamet, reiterates that the grandmother is a ghost before then hearing the use of word cipoa. Upon hearing this term, he then initiates the talk represented in extract 4.5. There are a number of important aspects to this extract, including repetition that enables convivial relations to be established between Lina and Desi and renewed discussion over the provenance of the term cipoa, which enable the pursuit of conviviality between Desi and Slamet in the interview that follows.

In the above talk we can see that the provenance of the term cipoa again becomes a topic as Slamet suggests cipoa is Sundanese (lines 2–3). Desi does not align fully with Slamet’s interpretation through her self-identifying as a Sundanese who has never heard the term (lines 7–8). While her comment repeats her uncertainty about provenance, which she shared with Gun (extracts 4.2–4.3), we can see that this talk also represents a point in which explicit social identification occurs through Desi’s claims to native speakership. This social identification occurs as part of another sequence in which participants assign an ethnic meaning to the word cipoa. We also see that Slamet, although not making native speaker claims, defers to kamus besar ‘Authorative Dictionary’

(lines 9–12 and 15–16) where he notes we may find this term. (Kamus Besar has its authority by being both written and endorsed by the government through the government funded language center in Jakarta.) In other words, Slamet is unconvinced that its provenance is not Sundanese despite Desi’s claims of not knowing the term. His position on this does not change as the viewing session is brought to a close and he notes that it is old archaic Sundanese on lines 31–32. In the early part of the interview that follows immediately after this viewing session, however, Desi takes up the theme of archaism in a way that suggests alignment with Slamet on a number of levels: in short, they too begin to build some common ground.

Lina also offers a meaning for cipoa, which does not relate to provenance, but rather to morality, especially a tendency to tell white lies or not be entirely honest (lines 13–14). This interpretation is oriented to by Desi through her repetition of bohong ‘to tell white lies or not be entirely honest’ (line 17) and her upgrade of this term to menipu ‘to deceive’ (line 20), which Lina ratifies through her expansion of the meaning to ‘someone who doesn’t know or talks rubbish’ (lines 23–24). In short, the social domain of the meaning of cipoa as relating to a moral trait also widens from me (extract 4.3) to include Desi and Lina. This sequence also appears to be similar to earlier instances of repetition insofar as they function not only as signs of topic alignment and the establishment of common ground, but also as more than is necessary in informational terms. In other words, the extra repetition from line 15 onwards seems to be doing more than just repeating the meaning of the term as something to do with dishonesty. Instead, this repetition seems to be contributing to the building



Slamet123

neneknya hantu (1.8) +oh+ (1.8) oh (looks at Desi) cipoa itu bahasa ini deh . sunda kayaknya (0.8)

Her grandmother is a ghost. Oh. Oh it looks like cipoa is Sundanese.

Desi4 nggak tahu = [I] don’t knowSlamet5 = cipoa . orang suka cipoa = A person who likes to cipoa.Desi 678

= tiga puluh tiga tahun jadi orang sunda baru denger (laughs) = [I’ve] been a Sundanese for thirty-three

years and [I’ve] just heard [this word]

Slamet9101112

= cari di ini (looks at Desi) . (turns back to look at Slamet) apa kamus bahasa Indonesia sama anu . kamus .

Look in this, what is it the Indonesian dictionary and the um, dictionary.

Lina1314

orang suka cipoa:: katanya . [ suka bohong apa (1.0)

She said “Those who like to cipoa have a tendency to tell white lies all the time, or something like that.”

Slamet > Gun151617

[ bahasa indonesia . kamus besar bahasa indonesia =

Indonesian, the Large Authorative Indonesian dictionary.

Desi 18 = bohong = To tell white lies.Lina1920

= untuk menutupi kekurangannya = To hide their inadequacies.

Desi 21 = menipu . eh = To deceive, eh?Slamet 2223

= cipoaé apa ya (1.75) What does Cipoa mean?

Lina2425

suka:: berdusta mungkin . ndak tahu itu (1.2) ah omong kosong (0.9)

Maybe [someone] who regularly deceives, [someone who] doesn’t know, [or] talks rubbish.

Slamet26 [ bahasa Its languageMe2728

[ mudah mudahan tidak begitu membosankan =

Hopefully this hasn’t been too boring.

Desi2930

= nggak . bagus (while laughing) [ lucu No, it was good, it was funny.

Slamet3132

[ bahasa sunda . bahasa sunda kuno (2.7) bahasa sunda kuno

It was Sundanese, old Sundanese, old Sundanese.

Extract 4.5 Negotiating meanings and conviviality

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of convivial relations, this time between Desi and Lina, who to this point have not interacted much.

5. IDENTITY, CONVIVIALITY, AND MEANINGIn the rest of my analysis I focus on talk that occurred in the interview that immediately followed the viewing session. As participants move into a different speech situation (e.g. from a viewing session to an interview) they continue to engage in the building of convivial relations using the features of talk discussed thus far. This talk is, in part, facilitated by the common ground thus far established between participants, including the various meanings of the word cipoa. What is also striking about this talk is that while thus far the meaning of cipoa has been multiple, in the talk in the interview that follows participants increasingly align with each other about the meanings of this word. The conversation below occurs after I bring up the talk about the word cipoa. It represents both the continued pursuit of ethnic sameness (Desi and Gun), the establishment of some common ground between Desi and Slamet, and the pursuit of sameness in opinions on the part of Desi and Lina.

In keeping with her earlier position on the provenance of cipoa (e.g. extract 4.3 on lines 23–24 and extract 4.5 on lines 7–8), Desi reiterates that the term is probably not Sundanese (lines 2–3); a position Gun appears to ratify (line 4). In doing so, she appears to be also identifying Gun as someone with native speaker expertise like herself. When viewed together with earlier instances of repetition, this pursuit of social sameness seems to also add to the building of convivial relations between these two participants. Slamet, however, does not fully align with this

suggestion. Instead, on lines 5–9 he reiterates his earlier position (see extract 4.5) about its probable existence in a dictionary and that it is probably an uncommon or archaic form. In doing so, he adds ‘uncommon’ to the term’s ever expanding meanings. The social domain of this meaning also seems to widen to include Desi and Lina, who appear to ratify this meaning on line 10 and lines 11–12 respectively. This ratification represents an occasion where Desi and Slamet, who have earlier disagreed on provenance, now achieve some common ground.

After again re-iterating one of the term’s meanings as relating to a negative personal trait (lines 13–14), in the talk that follows immediately afterwards, Desi repeats her alignment with Slamet and Lina around the ‘archaicness’ or ‘uncommonness’ of the term cipoa (extract 5.2). This repetition seems to be going beyond conversational alignment between Desi, Slamet, and Lina by repeating the information ‘we have aligned/agreed on this topic’ to do conviviality. In other words, in extract 5.2 participants are engaging in pursuing sameness in epistemic stance.

Here we see Desi again pursuing social sameness by literally asking Gun ‘are you the same as me’ through her utterance on lines 29–30 eh orang sunda bukan (‘You’re Sundanese aren’t you’). On lines 32–33 Slamet teases Gun, this time about Gun’s ambiguous native speaker credentials given his near decade-long stay in Japan. This is yet one further example of how teasing is used to build convivial relations among a group of relative strangers. We also see that Desi is repeating Slamet’s earlier suggestion that the word cipoa is old or archaic on lines 21–25 and 27–28. In so doing, she repeats her earlier alignment with Slamet about the archaicness of the form, while



Desi 123

= sebenarnya bukan yang jelas . (starts looking at Gun) kayaknya bukan bahasa sunda itu . [ kayanya istilah

Actually, it is not clear. It appears that it isn’t Sundanese, it appears like a term ...

Gun4 [ kayaknya (???) That’s what it appears like (???).

Slamet

56789

[ kayaknya . kayaknya kalau kita buka kamus besar kayaknya ada itu . cipoa itu (0.5) tapi bahasa yang jarang dipakai kayaknya . tidak [ umum #jadi#

It’s like, it’s like if we opened the authorative dictionary, it’s like the term cipoa would be there. But it’s like language that is rarely used, so it’s not common.

Desi

10 [ bahasa karuhun = Ancestor’s language.

Lina

1112

= bahasa tidak [ umum

Language [which] isn’t common.

Slamet

1314

[ jangan suka cipoa (1.1) #untuk menutupi kekurangannya# (1.8)

Don’t cipoa to cover up inadequacies.

Extract 5.1 Naming languages, native speakership, and pursuing social sameness

repeating Lina’s earlier contribution about the form’s uncommonness.

In addition to highlighting a return to the activity of working out the provenance of the term cipoa, we also see how this activity helps in the social identification of participants. For example, Desi tries to gain alignment from Gun (lines 27–28), before checking his native speaker credentials (29–30). In doing so, we get to again see the importance Desi places on native speakership when talking about language. In this instance, it appears that her explanation of the term cipoa rests both on the identity that has emerged over interactional time (that is, her identity as a native speaker of Sundanese), and her wish to have another native speaker (in this case Gun)

align with her ideas about why she does not know this term.

In the next extract we see that Slamet, who has actually lived and studied for five years in Bandung (stereotypically a heartland of Sundanese speakers), now also appears to be encouraged by Desi to explain aspects of Sundaneseness. In their interactions we get further insights into how repetition helps to establish more common ground between them as they pursue sameness in opinions about provenance, while further solidifying emerging convivial relations between these two. The talk in extract 5.3 follows almost immediately from the talk represented in extract 5.2 (I have deleted two turns by Lina and Desi).

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Me151617

jadi ada? . yang bahasa bahasa lain yang tadi #juga# . mungkin ndak (1.0) [ ndak mengerti gitu .

So is there other language from earlier that maybe [you] didn’t, didn’t understand, you know?

Slamet18 [ heem Yes. Desi 19202122232425

mungkin kan . kalau di bahasa sunda itu pak [author]’ . ah bahasa sunda itu ada istilah bahasa karuhun ya . >bahasa karuhun itu> bahasa yang tidak digunakan sehari hari:: . tapi sebenarnya orang orang tua di:: . tanah jawa barat itu menggunakan gitu’ .

Maybe, right, if it is Sundanese Mr. [author’s name], ah Sundanese has a term bahasa karuhan yeah. Bahasa karuhan means a language that isn’t used daily, but actually the elderly in West Java use it, you know.

Slamet26 [ heem Yes.

Desi

27282930

[ mungkin . generasinya saya . pak gun #gitu# tidak begitu mengena::l . (looks and points open hand at Gun) +eh+ >orang sunda> bukan .

Maybe my generation [and] Mr. Gun’s don’t really know the [language or its words]. Oops![You’re] Sundanese aren’t [you]?

Gun

31 heem = Yes.Slamet 3233

= orang [ sunda tapi tidak pernah di sunda #dia# (said while smiling)

[He’s] Sundanese but rarely lives in Sunda. (a joke pointing to Gun’s near decade-long stay in Japan)

Extract 5.2 It is uncommon Sundanese spoken by the elderly

In extract 5.3 we see the continued use of repetition as a way of showing hearership, for establishing reference and for establishing common ground. For example, Lina and Desi align on the topic of accent on lines 44–46, and Desi and Slamet align on the topic of the philosophy of life (lines 51–52). When viewed in relation to the prior talk in extract 5.2—where ‘archaic’ become a ratified meaning of the word cipoa amongst these two—we can say that this talk repeats much of the earlier talk. In doing so, it adds to their earlier alignments in a way that builds

upon the conviviality that has occurred throughout the whole session (viewing and interview). What appears even more striking is while Desi contested Slamet’s knowledge about things Sundanese (extract 4.5 lines 7–8), here she has made a number of concessions that have helped build common ground between the two, while also building convivial relations between them.

In particular, although Desi continues to foreground her expertise and identity as a Sundanese through her positive evaluation of the authenticity of the televised representations of



Sundaneseness that she had just watched (lines 38–39), nevertheless she also ratifies Slamet’s comments about things Sundanese. For example, after seeking approval from Desi on lines 48 and 51, Desi ratifies his contribution through the use of ‘heeh’ (line 49), as well as repetition and expansion (lines 53–55). Slamet goes on to explain that the reason for classifying cipoa as uncommon

and archaic relates to the old-fashioned social practices engaged in by the old woman represented in the soap. In this case it is her philosophy of life, which Slamet discusses at length after being invited to do so by Desi (on line 55). Without providing a transcript of the rest of the talk, Slamet notes that this philosophy relates to something like a clean environment around the home

Desi (S)36373839

jadi e:: . >buat generasi saya tida::k> tidak mengenal bahasa #itu# (0.6) tetapi karena yang menjadi neneknya ini sangat sunda . [ sundanese banget gitu ya’ .

So er for my generation [I] don’t don’t know that language. But because the grandmother is very Sundanese, very Sundanese, you know.

Slamet 40 [ hmmm (while nodding head) Yeah.Me41 gi . gimana [ a apa . apa yang? .

misalnya(False start), why, what, what is it, for example?

Desi (S) 4243

[ (orang sunda?) (1.0) +dari dialek+ . dari dialek . dari mis [ al kan

((Sundanese?)) From [the] dialect, from the dialect, from for example, right.

Lina44 [ logat = Accent.Desi (S)454647

= logat dari bicara itu (0.5) banyak bahasa sunda keluar . dari . dari (0.5) The speaking accent, a lot of Sundanese

also came with it. From, fromSlamet 48 psik psikologinya . (looking at Desi) Psch, their psychology.Desi (S)49 [ heeh YesSlamet 5051

[ ah bukan psikologi apa namanya . (looks at Desi) filsafat hidupnya:: =

Ah not their psychology, what is it, their philosophy of life.

Desi (S)52535455

= filsafat hidupnya itu:? . jadi kalau membersihkan halaman rumah? . maka:? . (looks at Slamet and smiles) >apa lagi>

Their philosophy of life. So if you clean your yard, then … what else Slamet?

Extract 5.3 The grandmother is just so Sundanese

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and means that we have a clean spirit and healthy life.

In summary, across another speech situation (an interview), we see the continued use of a number of features that seem to be used for building convivial relations amongst this group of Indonesians, including the use of teasing, the social pursuit of sameness, and repetition (both temporally close and that which is much earlier in the group session). The use of these features is intimately tied to the establishing of common ground (personal ethnic backgrounds, provenance, archaicness, and traditional philosophies of life) as well as continued acts of social identification.

6. CONCLUSIONThis paper added to a small but growing body of sociolinguistic work by focusing upon an old question in the Humanities and Social Sciences, namely how do people from diverse backgrounds do conviviality. I explored the relationships between the use of strings of small response tokens (non-minimal responses) and a form of linguistic reciprocity commonly referred to as ‘repetition’, how these features both helped to establish common ground and pursue social sameness, and how all of this figured in the building and maintenance of convivial relations between a group of Indonesians living in Japan. My empirical focus was on the conversations of these Indonesians as they engaged in viewing an Indonesian soap, and as they engaged in a group interview afterwards.

Repetition of words and small utterances was the primary way in which participants went about establishing reference and common ground. While some common ground was emergent, nevertheless the agreement on referents

formed the basis for subsequent convivial talk. The establishment of common ground through repetition (i.e. the reciprocal exchange of linguistic forms) was also part of the more general processes of building convivial relations between these Indonesians. Conviviality was also built through the use of non-minimal responses, teasing, and the social pursuit of sameness; in this case sameness in terms of ethnolinguistic background and in opinions about the meaning of the word cipoa. As Goffman’s (1971) work suggests, the import of this type of conversational work is not just the conviviality that is established in the immediate setting, but the potential for future conviviality in other settings.

For this group of Indonesians it is understandable that they engaged in this type of talk (instead of say staying silent throughout the two-hour session and not attending the subsequent three viewing and interviewing sessions) because their situation as sojourners required them to engage in conviviality. Indeed, most had gone from being reasonably well-off Indonesians in Indonesia with dense networks of friends and kin who could be relied upon to offer financial support and physical labor in times of need, to being relatively poor and needing to rely upon other unfamiliar Indonesians to provide financial and physical support as well as information about how best to eke out a living in Japan. Access to such networks required and was reproduced by attending regular gatherings and by engaging in convivial practices in such gatherings. Thus, by actively working on establishing common ground and pursuing social sameness, participants (re)produced the basis for subsequent convivial relations and access to the important networks that would help them while sojourning in Japan.



NOTES1. This is a revised version of a working

paper entitled ‘Indonesians doing togetherness in Japan’, which was first presented as part of a panel titled ‘Constructing identities in transnational spaces’ at the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference in Boston in March 2012. It then appeared in 2013 as a working paper (No. 67) in the series Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. I subsequently presented this version at a workshop at Tilburg University. I would like to thank Jan Blommaert who engaged with the paper in 2012 and Max Spotti, Piia Varis, Sanna Lehtonen, Tom van Nuenen, Paul Mutsaers, and the dozen postgraduate students who engaged with this paper during my stay at Tilburg University. As always, responsibility for the final version lies squarely with me.

2. This research was made possible by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant No. C20520380). I would like to thank the participants in this study for their willingness to be involved and for their graciousness and good-humored responses to my questions. I would also like to thank a team of Indonesian research assistants who have worked with me on this project, including Eni, Riris, Inu, and Puji.

3. Pak is literally ‘Mr.’ but interactionally is typically used as a kin term and has indexical relationships with ideas about fatherhood and the offering of respect to elders.

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67

1. INTRODUCTION

In shared, socially and culturally mixed localities truncated multilingual practices

are a central element of conviviality, a mode of minimal sociality among people who maintain differences.1 In both Catalonia and Casamance, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Casamançais migrants and their families and friends, diverse linguistic repertoires are used to get by in everyday life. To an extent, this reflected the linguistically diverse local population.2 Catalonia’s everyday bilingualism of Catalan

and Castilian has seen further diversification due to immigration and Catalan is politically promoted as the shared lingua franca; in Casamance, various linguistic preferences persist alongside local, regional, and national linguae francae. In both localities, inhabitants use diverse linguistic repertoires to get by in everyday life. I will argue that truncated, but diversified language practices, which compose linguistically diverse repertoires, are central in facilitating conviviality among local residents. Minimal interactions and ‘small talk’ cushion potentially conflictual cultural differences and social stratification.

Between phatic communion and coping tactic. Casamançais

multilingual practices

Tilmann HeilUniversity of Konstanz

AbstractThis paper enquires into the role of multilingual practices in conviviality in shared, socially and culturally mixed localities. I ask how Casamançais use diverse repertoires to get by in everyday life in both Casamance, Senegal and Catalonia, Spain. The concept of conviviality stresses fragile, dynamic processes characteristic of everyday ways of living together with maintained difference. I argue that minimal, but diversified language practices, which compose linguistically diverse repertoires, are central in facilitating conviviality among local residents. Minimal interactions and ‘small talk’, or phatic communion, cushion potentially conflictual socio-cultural differences and inequalities. Firstly, I will evaluate discourses on multilingual practices of Casamançais in both contexts. Second, I will critically explore the reasons for and quality of the widespread use of diverse repertoires. I conclude that multilingual practices facilitate phatic communion sometimes playfully and sometimes as part of coping strategies in situations in which structural forces determine which choices will be more successful than others. The process of conviviality spans both these aspects describing ever-dynamic and ever-fragile ways of living with difference.

Keywords: everyday; conviviality; phatic communion; tactics; inequality; Casamance; Catalonia; multilingualism; polylanguaging

© Heil and CMDR. 2015


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Well aware that minimal interactions change over time and according to wider social contexts (cf. Heil 2013), here I discuss the significance of ‘knowing just enough’, i.e. developing a truncated multilingual register needed to sustain minimal interactions. I ask how such truncated multilingualism facilitates conviviality by way of ‘phatic communion’ (cf. Malinowski [1923] 1994), which I define as a sequence of situations in which people communicate using minimal, mutually intelligible semiotic resources. Truncated multilingualism refers to repertoires which vary in degrees of diversity but result from ‘creatively appropriat[ing] the voices of others across language boundaries, while [potentially only] possessing a very limited knowledge of the languages being appropriated’ (Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck 2005: 199). I use this interchangeably with polylanguaging which describes ‘the use of features associated with different “languages” even when speakers only know few features associated with (some of) these “languages”’ (Jørgensen 2011: 33). In the cases discussed in this paper, some interlocutors exhibited quite sophisticated linguistic knowledge, yet they often had proven to be specialists in ‘knowing just enough’ of particular languages and further cultural practices which they had ‘learned in passing’. I am particularly interested in the moments of phatic communion as a form of ritualised interaction, which in (super)diverse contexts requires both truncated multilingualism and cultural translation. Additionally, I question which social differentiations are related to diverse linguistic repertoires and how hierarchies and power discrepancies are negotiated in phatic communion and thus, conviviality. I will therefore account for both the language ideologies and the use of (conflicting) linguae francae in various social situations.

My aim is to engage with the tensions between a playful practice and attitude,

and people coping with situations in which structural forces determine which (linguistic) choices are more successful than others. I will explore this dialectic relationship via ethnographic case studies of a Jola, a Mandinka, and a Fula, who only to varying degrees perceive multilingualism as something positive and/or necessary. I will show when the logic of economic interactions obliges them to use various, dominant repertoires beyond their individual linguistic aspirations. Next, I will give some crucial empirical background paying particular attention to the Catalan language policy and the cosmopolitan self-representation and multilingual practices in Casamance.

2. FRAMING ENCOUNTERS WITH DIFFERENCEAlthough there were common features in the migration trajectories of the mainly male Casamançais I worked with in Catalonia, the cases varied in terms of migration trajectory, the economic means available to them, methods of entry, and living situation upon arrival. The cases of my interlocutors also differed according to places of origin, rural or urban place of residence, ethnic and religious background, formal education, and age. As one important consequence of this diversity of life trajectories, Casamançais over the years had been exposed to variously configured linguistic landscapes. Accounting for this complexity where necessary, both regional contexts nevertheless possess some distinctive features to which my interlocutors referred and which provide frameworks to their multilingual practices and their interpretation.3

Both Casamance and Catalonia show diverse linguistic configurations in which I observed a two-sided process. Firstly, diverse linguistic repertoires are commonplace to

69Between phatic communion and coping tactic


local residents due to complex histories of migration and longstanding ethnic and linguistic plurality. Secondly, this situation is complemented by the role of various languages which assume the role of the regional or situational lingua franca (cf. Juillard 1991; Dreyfus and Juillard 2005; Juillard 2005; Pujolar 2009; Gal 2013; Pujolar and Gonzàlez 2013; Woolard and Frekko 2013). The regional perspective is conducive to the present endeavour since it helps shifting our focus away from a focus on national languages and local mother tongues (cf. Heil 2012). It avoids methodological nationalism as well as an ethnic lens (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003; Glick Schiller, Çağlar, and Guldbrandsen 2006). Taking subnational regions as an entry point, further categories, such as the national, ethnic, and social ones, continue to play out alongside each other; I will consider them in the following section.

Diversifying CataloniaCatalonia is an autonomous region in the northeast of Spain. Not least because of the distinctive language and culture of Catalonia, various political movements and regional institutions have claimed its distinctiveness and relative autonomy from the Castilian-dominated Spanish nation state. After the subaltern endurance of Catalan during the Franco period (May 2012: 257), today Catalan ought to play the role of the ‘common public language’ (Generalitat de Catalunya 2009: 69), or, put simply, the lingua franca embedded in a policy of active multilingualism. Apart from the Franco legacies, Castilian influences in Catalonia derive from the large internal labour migration from the south of Spain to the north since the 1950s (Castells 2009: 51). They settled in the suburbs of Barcelona and the surrounding industrial towns, where I conducted

fieldwork. A further layer of complexity consists of the rapid and significant immigration of international and cheap labour since the early 2000s, which in 2010 locally accounted for 17.5 per cent of the population (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2011). This immigration is often concentrated in the neighbourhoods built by the southern Spanish arrivals at the periphery of the old Catalan city centres. Currently, this share of the population comes from over 120 different countries of origin (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2011) and speaks 250 different mother tongues (Generalitat de Catalunya 2009: 69). Independent of their skill level, most international immigrants in the 2000s, certainly those from sub-Saharan Africa, worked in agriculture, factories, construction, the service industries or the informal sector (Díez Nicolás 2002: 266).

Mataró, a medium sized, industrial town some 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, was one of my fieldwork sites and confirms the general picture. In the neighbourhoods at the periphery where I worked, around 50 per cent of the population is born outside Catalonia, all of whom exhibit distinctive, and often multiple diverse linguistic repertoires (Ajuntament de Mataró 2010). Around half of them speak Castilian, often of a Southern Spanish variety. The remaining are international immigrants from other parts of the world and continue to maintain their respective linguistic repertoires.

In such a situation of diversification, the Catalan migration and language policies become particularly apparent. In the renewed Statute of Autonomy in 2006 (Generalitat de Catalunya 2006), which can be regarded as one of the hallmarks of the Catalan independence ambitions, Catalonia emerges as a nation due to its culture and language. It stylises the Catalan culture as mixed and cosmopolitan, facilitating the inclusion of foreigners. ‘Un pacte per

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viure junts i juntes. Pacte Nacional per a la Immigració’4, which followed the Statute in 2009, more generally formulates a regional policy on migration and integration and applies some elements of immigration management and control so far dealt with on the state level. Consequently, in 2010 Catalonia was granted the right to issue its own residency and work permits.

The promotion of Catalan language continues in both this National Agreement and its practical application, the Citizenship and Immigration Plan, now also concerning immigrant reception and as a means of bridging the practice of everybody’s distinct mother tongue (Generalitat de Catalunya 2009: 69; Generalitat de Catalunya 2010b: 68). The stated aim of the Citizen and Immigration Plan is ‘… to foster knowledge of Catalan among the entire population of Catalonia, especially among foreigners, and also extend the use of Catalan in all community and social relationship environments.’ (Generalitat de Catalunya 2010a: 68).

Eight million Euros have been earmarked for ‘Catalan language normalisation’ compared to just slightly over 100 thousand Euros for language of origin classes (Generalitat de Catalunya 2010a: 146–48). The imbalance could not be expressed more strongly. In a first step, these policies had mitigated the bilateral political opposition of Castilian and Catalan by embedding it in the practised multilingualism in Catalonia. Yet, as a second step, no doubt remained that Catalan profited as the only lingua franca.

Casamançais linguistic diversityIn contrast, Casamance is a region of long-standing diversity in the south of Senegal. The national census of 2002 gives 19 different ethnic groups, leaving some to the category of ‘other’. Focusing only on the Lower and Middle Casamance where I did

fieldwork, those administrative departments with urban agglomerations, Ziguinchor and Sédhiou are very heterogeneous (Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie 2008, 2009). Most of the ethnic groups categorised in the census speak recognised national languages. In 1972, Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor had officially granted six languages equal status as national languages of Senegal, in contrast to French as the official one. He had envisioned this configuration as a way to foreclose ethnic group-based conflict guaranteeing equal recognition. In 2001, President Wade expanded the ‘national’ status to all codified local languages which raised the number to currently 24 languages listed as national ones (Diallo 2010).

While many of the linguistic and cultural diversity arguments could be made for Senegal as a whole, Casamançais often claim their home region to be different from the rest of Senegal for its more comprehensive ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. The Casamançais distinctiveness was dressed up as cosmopolitan in contrast to the Wolof-dominated north. While the reasons for the Casamançais independence movement are complex and multiple (e.g. Lambert 1998; Foucher 2003; de Jong and Gasser 2005; Evans 2005; Marut 2010; Foucher 2011), the cultural specificity of Casamance frequently came to stand next to the more important developmental gridlock and the political marginalisation of the region (Foucher 2002).

While for political purposes the Northerners and Wolof remain the quintessential other of the Casamançais, the Wolof language increasingly plays a role in Casamance as a language of commerce and among youth (Dreyfus and Juillard 2005). According to the 2002 census, in Ziguinchor around 15 per cent speak Wolof as their first language and 53



per cent as their second, which confirms it as an important, widely spoken language (Agence Nationale de la Statistique et de la Démographie 2008, 2009). However, the census gives no information on further languages spoken, which would be crucial to grasp language dynamics in Casamance. Thus, the picture is already very different in Sédhiou, the second regional capital. 45 per cent name Mandinka as their first language and another 52 per cent as their second one. In Middle Casamance, Mandinka clearly remains the lingua franca. Insights from peripheral markets in Ziguinchor also shows that they mainly operate in local languages, but interactions are often multilingual (Dreyfus and Juillard 2005). In the centre of Ziguinchor and at the main market, multilingual interactions are even more frequent accounting for up to 70 per cent of all interactions. Only in the centre is Wolof used in over 70 per cent of all interactions (ibid.). These aggregate findings already emphasise the need to closely study the local contexts to understand multilingual practices and their representation. The multilingual Ziguinchor configuration sets the context for the linguistic practices of Augustin Sambou5, which I discuss next.

3. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A CONVIVIAL PLACEFrom the outset, Casamançais were exposed to multiple local languages and often had diversified, if truncated multilingual repertoires. To better comprehend the linguistic dynamics in Casamance, I first turn to Augustin Sambou’s language practices before introducing the lives of two Casamançais migrants in Catalonia. In contexts of obvious linguistic diversity, I enquire what the reasons are for situationally choosing a specific language

or getting on with mixed linguistic practices. How do people relate to the everyday occurrence of polylanguaging? How do they judge multilingual practices? I will arrive at answers to these questions by way of focusing on the various multilingual practices and social processes, which the three distinct cases offer.

Augustin SambouIn the local context of Casamance, one does not need to migrate far, if at all, to develop a very varied linguistic repertoire. Augustin came to Casamance in the 1970s as a refugee from Guinea Bissau. He had finished high school in Ziguinchor, had become a primary school teacher, and prepared for an exam for a higher administrative position. One of my close confidants, Augustin had a wide range of linguistic registers from which to choose. He was Jola, the largest ethnic group in Lower Casamance; however, people could tell his dialect was Bissau Guinean. He had only spent a short time in Dakar and, when we met, mainly commuted between various villages in the Casamance-Bissau Guinean borderlands. Following a general trend, he mainly used Wolof in everyday encounters with people of his age. With his more distant relatives from Guinea Bissau, he spoke Creole, with his family members his home dialect of Jola, and with his landlord he spoke Jola Fogny, the most widely used variety. He also handled encounters in Mandinka and some aspects of conversations in Fula. With his colleagues, he conversed in French, while with me he sometimes coquetted in English. Finally, he also understood Portuguese.

Mirroring Augustin’s linguistic repertoire, the peripheral neighbourhoods of Ziguinchor were perceived as a similarly diversified linguistic landscape. Despite

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the increasing importance of Wolof, people did not perceive a single language to dominate public interactions and showed an immense linguistic flexibility. People disagreed over situationally dominant linguae francae and the distinctions both among local inhabitants’ ethnic origins and linguistic practices were vague, shifting, and constantly evaded efforts to generalise. Sometimes, people spoke of specific ethnic groups or they mentioned which languages were mostly spoken, at other times people just mentioned the great diversity among the inhabitants.

Living in spaces in which their mother tongues were often not the dominant ones, many Casamançais of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds tended to portray their multilingual practice as a competence and expression of their cosmopolitan attitudes (cf. Heil 2012). This also emerged from the playful, skilful, and easy-going use of diverse repertoires by which Casamançais creatively engaged with the given situation and exchanged nothing more than non-propositional language. At its basis, I witnessed the Casamançais discourses on multilingual practices in both Casamance and Catalonia. In being particularly apt, Augustin embodied both the ideal-typical competence and the aspired cosmopolitan attitude of many Casamançais with whom I interacted. While others just staked a claim to speak many languages, Augustin was more differentiated in his assessment of his language repertoire. He knew his qualities and deficiencies well and humbly put his everyday language practices into perspective. He liked to portray it as the normal way of living, which referred to the expectations of good neighbourliness and thus conviviality (Heil 2014a).

On many days, I could accompany Augustin during his everyday business. On

the back of his motorbike or walking with him through Ziguinchor neighbourhoods, he linguistically adapted quite aptly to the changing situations. Contrary to his humble reflections, it seemed that he effortlessly faded in and out of situations and the necessary registers to facilitate interaction. The underlying principles of interaction that Augustin and others stated were the respect for those encountered and the wish to receive difference openly. They portrayed their linguistic skills as a chosen and positively connoted aspect of their everyday social relations. Augustin underlined this point by happily translating for me the discussions that were on-going. More importantly, people would even switch to French for substantial parts of the conversation to have me participate. At the same time, they trained my own expending linguistic repertoire in practising those skills I had acquired in local languages.

On the other hand, most of the time nothing particularly surprising seemed to be said in fleeting encounters. The showing of interest in the neighbour’s well-being prescribed by cohabitation in Casamance resembled more ritualised practice than real concern for the other’s well-being. Many Casamançais read such forms of politeness and recognition as signs of respect, which were needed, as they argued, since this was Africa. Using merely familiar phrases that pleased those encountered exemplifies a practice which Malinowski described in the 1920s as phatic communion:

A mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. … There can be no doubt that we have here a new type of linguistic use —phatic communion … [T]his is in fact achieved by speech,



and the situation in all such cases is created by the exchange of words, by the specific feelings which form convivial gregariousness, by the give and take of utterances which make up ordinary gossip. (Malinowski [1923] 1994: 9-10, emphasis in the original)

In a situation of linguistic diversity such as in Casamance, Malinowski’s focus on spoken interaction needs some qualifications. The literal meaning of words indeed was irrelevant for Casamançais, yet language ideologies prescribed a need to utter them in (one of) the language(s) accepted or preferred in a given social situation. Often, Casamançais addressed the language ideologies playfully maintaining phatic communion. In situations of unequal power relations, however, their multilingualism presented itself as a tactical choice.

When I went with Augustin to inquire at a mechanic if he had repaired and sold Augustin’s old motorbike, Augustin’s tactic of using his multilingual repertoire and speaking Wolof failed to establish phatic communion and achieve a positive outcome for the negotiation. While he seemed fluent in Wolof speaking to his friends, he audibly struggled to argue his case to the mechanic. Instead of maintaining his playfulness, his sentences broke up into clumsy junks whenever he had to think of the right technical terms which he frequently could not help but replace with French words. In principle this is not remarkable since Urban Wolof incorporates many French words (Juillard 1994; Swigart 2000; McLaughlin 2008) and ‘Wolof only works with a little bit of French’, as one of my other informants once explained to me. Augustin, however, later admitted that he had struggled to find appropriate Wolof expressions. The mechanic had also noticed this. As a consequence, Augustin had not convincingly used Wolof features since he

neither achieved phatic communion with the mechanic nor his pertinent economic objective of quickly selling his bike. Yet, he had felt under pressure to use Wolof since he envisioned the chances of settling a good deal to significantly increase.

All of a sudden, Wolof was no longer a choice but a way of coping with the situational opportunity structures. They need to be understood as multidimensional hierarchisations, which result from the situational significance of various language registers which people activate, as well as from the perceived social statuses of the people present. The mechanic had been in the centre of town where Wolof increasingly prevailed as a means of interacting commercially. Augustin had chosen a central mechanic despite his difficulties to relate to him due to the language barrier. Yet he needed the services that only this mechanic could offer as a rare specialist. While he previously had had good experiences, this time Augustin’s tactic failed. In need of money, he assumed a powerless social position which his meagre attempts at Wolof did not cushion. Judging his own linguistic competences, Augustin knew that he could have been more competent in Jola or French than in Wolof since he had not grown up with it nor used it under such circumstances before. However, the mechanic’s situationally superior position based in his professional competence and central location in town had let him dictate the terms of interaction. At least, this must have been Augustin’s perception of the situationally specific opportunity structures according to which he had acted. As a consequence, Augustin’s difficulties to satisfactorily blend in linguistically and his economically weak position had prevented his successful negotiation.

His intended strategic choice of dealing with his own subject position had not resulted in the expected outcome.

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Put differently, his own Casamançais language ideology of multilingualism had been brought to a limit entering an economic field in which rules governed that he did not master to the required level. Augustin failed at using Wolof as a commodity, which it was intended to be in this economic exchange. Language here needs to be understood from the economic angle (Irvine 1989), from which it could appear as either a strategically applied resource or coping tactic.

In addition to their multilingual self-representation, the linguistic flexibility and creativity of Casamançais thus is, in certain situations, a way of dealing with situational power structures in the attempt to make economic ends meet. Truncated multilingualism and the convivial effects of phatic communion thus may become a currency to cope with real socio-economic disparities. Rather than free play, I argue that Casamançais tried to tactically influence this exchange on the outcome of which they were dependent. Such a situation, I will show next, became more frequent in the emigration context.

Aboubacar DiaoAboubacar Diao, a Fula in Catalonia, had felt constrained in his choice of language in interactions on the labour market and in everyday life in Catalonia. He had grown up in an ethnically diverse village of the Sédhiou region, where unlike many other villages in Middle Casamance, the predominance of Mandinka was contested, most fiercely by the locally resident Fula. Meeting him in Catalonia, Aboubacar claimed to have already started to forget Mandinka. Instead, he actively only maintained Wolof and Fula from his Senegalese repertoire. In Catalonia, he had first learned Castilian but quickly changed to Catalan. His

young Fula wife from the same village of origin, who had recently arrived and given birth to their child, also took Catalan language classes. Contrary to other migrants, they neither shared their house with family or friends, nor had direct African neighbours. The few Fula living close-by, they hardly visited.

While there were some Casamançais immigrants that felt an immediate interest in the Catalan language as an expression of a regional specificity and diversity much like in Casamance, others like Aboubacar had initially set out to learn Spanish since their work trajectories would not be limited to Catalonia alone. Back then, Aboubacar had reasoned that Catalan was of no use in the rest of Spain and Europe. This rational argument ranking languages paralleled a similar practice in Senegal. In general, Fula and Mandinka speakers discredited Wolof since they thought its geographical reach was limited to Senegal and Gambia alone. In contrast, both Mandinka and Fula were languages with a trans-regional or—as some liked to claim—a pan-African reach. Neither Catalan nor Wolof could claim such a significance. Yet, reasons beyond possible onward migrations led to a re-evaluation of specific language ideologies. For example, Aboubacar preferred Wolof to Mandinka due to his direct confrontation with Mandinka in his village of origin. Casamançais entextualise their own situation in the contexts of (competing) language ideologies. Therefore, Aboubacar had started to care for Catalan.

The first day I met Aboubacar and his wife, he had just come back from a Catalan class. Being reluctant to learn Catalan at first, the Diaos had observed three practical reasons for positively engaging and learning Catalan. On the labour market and in public institutions, Catalans would increasingly assume



Catalan as the lingua franca and not switch to Castilian automatically, thus limiting the access of those not able to speak Catalan. To participate locally and to achieve one’s own goals it was necessary to avoid such situations. Second, knowing that someone only understood Castilian, Catalans could speak about him or her in Catalan unnoticed. Since this was potentially dangerous, it needed to be prevented at all costs. Finally, the Diaos noticed that a group of locals would receive someone well if addressed in Catalan.6 While this applied to all immigrants, sub-Saharan Africans frequently earned a lot of respect from the Catalans for their high linguistic sensibility. Among them, all three dimensions had been recurrent themes reiterating the importance of Catalan. Those not knowing Catalan risked being excluded and potentially discriminated against. To prevent this, the Diaos regularly attended Catalan classes and did not rely on the vernacular everyone else picked up on the street.

Taking classes in Catalan contrasted with Aboubacar’s attitude to Castilian that he only continued to pick up on the streets and at work. The working class street register of Castilian and some minimal knowledge of Catalan would have sufficed for Aboubacar to work in low-skilled employment and maintain phatic interactions as many Casamançais did. Indeed, some Casamançais without formal education sounded like their Andalusian neighbours and work colleagues, and thus succeeded in creating phatic communion and earning their living. Aboubacar, however, aspired to more, he envisioned himself upwardly mobile for which he needed to extend his proficiency in Catalan. Seemingly as a side product of this aspiration, the Diaos had bought into the autonomy narrative of Catalonia with its own culture and language, which for them was a legitimate

explanation of the increasing pride of Catalans and their efforts to promote Catalan. Apart from being a sign of respect for regional specificity, plenty of Casamançais furthermore sympathised with the Catalan minority concern similar to that of the Casamançais in Senegal, and the symbolic role of Jola, Mandinka, and other even smaller language groups therein. Quite literally, they compared and translated the cultural dynamics of the two regions, thus making them intelligible.

As the dominant narrative, however, Aboubacar portrayed his efforts to speak and understand Catalan as a tactical choice, which was facilitated by some sympathy for a minority language. He felt a need for Catalan to approach people and to find work; he tactically tried to comply with the requirements set by those who could either grant or deny access to employment and services. In contrast to others who had transplanted some of their linguistic playfulness to Catalonia, his engagement with Catalan showed little of such an attitude. To achieve his own goals, Aboubacar seemingly did the necessary by using the resource of the dominant local lingua franca.

Language ideologies promoting a single lingua franca thus have the potential to challenge truncated multilingualism as the basis of phatic communion. The imposition of regionally dominant or politically favoured linguae francae like Catalan, Mandinka or Wolof puts the relative equality among interacting parties and their linguistic repertoires and registers at risk. This can result in spaces being claimed by some local residents who then intend to impose their language preferences on others. In large shares of the public and economic sphere of Catalonia, Catalans occupied such a position. Nevertheless, most Casamançais

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(seemingly) playfully maintained phatic communion for either normative or tactical reasons, or both.

None of the aspects facilitating phatic communion in a local social field can thus be taken for granted. For many Casamançais, cultural translation and sustaining the local style of address are in general a morally correct tactical choice.7 However, normative evaluations of social, cultural, and religious collective and individual aspirations, and of local configurations of language ideologies challenge its feasibility. Some Casamançais struggled with differences in what constituted phatic exchange. For example, rushing social encounters or reducing them was hardly translatable for Casamançais who believed in the importance of making time for encounters as part of Casamançais cohabitation. Additionally, educated Casamançais interacting with working-class Andalusian neighbours found it hard to generously equate their different practices due to the class differences; they were appalled by unpleasant working-class small talk. Yet this emotionally trapped them between their disdain and mockery of their neighbours’ repertoires, and their own lack of respect this portrayed.

Indeed, Aboubacar had been struggling to cope with the local forms of creating phatic communion. Despite learning the language, he stated his preference at work and outdoors to interact as little as possible, mainly to avoid trouble. While he would watch and listen, he never commented or joked. To him local ways of joking were frequently insulting rather than funny. Apart from speaking as little as possible, Aboubacar also explained to keep his bodily expressions to a minimum, for example not looking into the eyes of passers-by.

Aboubacar’s limited engagement

at work and in public, as well as his multilingual choices mirror his constant evaluation of how to most efficiently deal with current conditions. From the outset in Casamance, he had only picked up language repertoires that were useful to know. Thus, he stopped at the level of greeting in Castilian but invested more in Catalan after he had seen possible pitfalls in case he did not. He quickly invested in the latter to access realms of society from which he otherwise found himself excluded. Part of this logic was also, to keep the encounters to a minimum of acknowledging each other’s presence and distinctiveness.

Like in Casamance, Aboubacar had used the suitable registers and forms of interaction to the necessary extent. To recognise such locally specific forms of interaction was also part of the process of cultural translation, i.e. the successful translation between multiple systems of meaning, making them intelligible and moving between them. Casamançais expressed their disposition towards such practices through a close observation of local sociality which they compared to their previous social experiences and to the information gained from co-migrants in the new place. In contrast to Aboubacar, who tactically reacted to changing circumstances, we will see next how Idrissa Samaté believed in the genuine usefulness of multiple languages and how he mastered the fine-tuning of situational styles and registers with a certain playfulness.

Idrissa SamatéIdrissa Samaté, a Mandinka from Sédhiou town, had been politically well connected in a socialist-Marxist party which had ceased to exist leaving various splinter groups behind. As a result, Idrissa felt that his future in Senegal



had waned and decided to try migration inspired by his foster brother, whom he eventually joined in Spain. He had left his wife and children behind to start the life of a migrant exposed to the vagaries of an uncertain future, which was in contrast to his initially promising outlook in Senegal.

Explaining his linguistic repertoire, he stressed his secure family background and formal education in Senegal at the University of Dakar. His whole family was at least fluent in French, Wolof, and Mandinka. Idrissa himself was a recognised language authority for Mandinka, his mother tongue, both in Casamance and Catalonia. The Casamançais advertising his language proficiency often implied more than just language: they meant a profound knowledge of Mandinka cultural practices and their texts. For this reason, Idrissa regularly received visitors on weekends who came from neighbouring towns to attend his gatherings or causeries. Furthermore, they demanded his guidance in rituals at any kind of cultural event that was held in and around his current place of residence.

Idrissa’s extensive knowledge of home combined with an active engagement with the Catalan locality. Like many others, Idrissa believed in the centrality of being able to communicate in a new context in which he invested a lot from the start. Although he dedicated most of his time to migrant associations, he had shown an interest in local associations and always participated in associational meetings on the municipality level. When I met him seven years after his arrival in Catalonia, he furthermore had become a relatively well-known and respected figure in the trade unionism of Catalonia.

Working for one of the main trade unions in the field of migrants’ rights, he spent his days using the full scope of his

linguistic repertoire. In campaigns, he emphasised the importance of interacting with Moroccan and Latin American workers as well as sub-Saharan ones. In the office block, however, his Catalan register proved important. On the corridors and in casual meetings he constantly exchanged the odd question and short commentary with his co-workers. In style he adjusted to the union environment, addressing most people as compañera/o, company/a, or camarada.8 Which one of the Castilian or Catalan union forms of address he used remained often unclear since he kept a low voice throughout the day. Speaking softly was one major difference he had previously identified between here and there, referring broadly to Catalonia, Spain, or Europe on the one hand, and Casamance, Senegal, or Africa on the other. Apart from scripted responses, he most of the time earned a recognising smile. By the time I met him, Idrissa had become a widely known person throughout the office block and had secured his social position. While this was partly due to being one of the few migrants working there, his efforts put into knowing enough Catalan and fitting in stylistically had their effect and facilitated phatic communion and everyday conviviality.

To get on in multiple languages had always been helpful to him. Knowing Wolof and French had been useful resources in Senegal and continued to be in Spain. In Catalonia, Idrissa assured me that knowing either some Catalan or Castilian was a mandatory first step to integrate, as he phrased it. However, he himself made use of them both. Catalan was important at the office and in dealing with the municipality, but Castilian was a central means to get by in the neighbourhood. Apart from the many Moroccans and Latin Americans with

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whom Idrissa used español or ‘Spanish’, it also served with the Anglophone and Lusophone sub-Saharan immigrants. With fellow Africans little or unknown, the geographical scope of Mandinka, Wolof and French was simply too limited to facilitate communication.

Despite knowing the value of linguae francae, in our discussion Idrissa made the case for the general desirability of polylanguaging. He repeatedly stated that it was desirable to learn further languages such as his mother tongue, Mandinka, or Jola.9 His support of various co-existing language ideologies demonstrates the multiple allegiances with which multilingualism plays. The lingua franca of a place is crucial, but being able to situationally draw from a wide repertoire certainly had a positive effect on facilitating conviviality. Thus, Idrissa would use ‘union-Catalan’ at work, ‘Spanish’ with strangers, Wolof with Senegalese, and Mandinka with the people who knew him and at home. Even Idrissa did not always seek proficiency in the standard register. Especially the proximity of Castilian, Catalan, and French invited creative improvisations, a skill many Casamançais had. Idrissa regularly experienced that this would work since in phatic communion language ideologies were easily satisfied by partial and fragmentary, yet appropriate language practice.

Idrissa embraced multiple languages more than most of my informants. To be as successful as he was in both keeping a high social standing in the migrant community and among co-workers, he had developed an advanced sense of appropriate registers and styles. Whether in the trade union, in migrant associations, in public spaces or at home, Idrissa consciously adjusted to every encounter. Although he had achieved more than most Casamançais and he seemingly enjoyed himself, he

occasionally portrayed his life and with it the language choices as a way of coping as an immigrant. Drawing on this migration discourse and alluding to the necessary efforts of the apprenticeship on which he had embarked was just another way of engaging with political dynamics at hand. While Idrissa genuinely believed in the appropriateness of polylanguaging, he also was strategic enough to dress it up as a coping tactic specific to a migrant’s life, which was convincing in times of increasingly dominant and exclusivist language ideologies as in the case of Catalan. Idrissa’s case thus offers a reading of a generally embracing engagement with polylanguaging for the sake of phatic communion and, in consequence, conviviality; however, it also raises an awareness for the tactical use of polylanguaging within the wider discourse of immigration.

4. CONCLUSIONSIn the introduction, I asked to what extent Casamançais polylanguaging is a way of playfully facilitating phatic communion and conviviality, and how far is it a result of a wider coping tactic of people who often hold a comparatively powerless subject position. It is worth remembering that multilingual practices of the same people play out in a number of situations, for example, (seemingly) unintentional everyday encounters in public space, meetings in political contexts, and economic interactions. In this regard, multilingualism is both intended and practised in various ways depending on the overall configurations of the context and the social situation itself. The three examples have shown that it is a process found among people of disparate socioeconomic backgrounds. Depending on all of these factors—the actual situation, the structural context, and the subject



position of the speaker—multilingual practices facilitate phatic communion sometimes playfully and sometimes as part of coping tactics.

Looking at the regional contexts, Casamance and Catalonia are structured by quite different configurations of language ideologies. While in Casamance multilingual practices were part of the regionally dominant discourse, in Catalonia the Catalan language ideology supported Catalan as the main lingua franca. Catalan dominated in the political sphere and in Catalan work environments. Both Aboubacar and Idrissa alluded to this; yet, their cases also showed that it was often enough to know some Catalan features to achieve conviviality. Moreover, Castilian regularly proved equally important, yet in different social situations, such as in neighbourhoods and while doing manual labour alongside Spaniards from the South and other immigrants. In contrast, the need to speak Wolof, increasingly the Senegalese lingua franca in politics, trade, and youth culture, demonstrated the limits of the multilingual ideology in Casamance.

The case studies have shown how the process of conviviality happens at the interplay of multiple dimensions of difference, which was reflected in both the configuration of the social fields, and the people’s practices of polylanguaging and translation. Often strong supporters of multilingual repertoires, Casamançais normatively justified the equality and co-existence of multiple languages, styles, and registers in a local social field, yet at the same time situationally accepted, and creatively made use of, a lingua franca, as well as the appropriate styles and registers. Despite some like Aboubacar Diao who did not positively relate to multilingualism, many Casamançais valued (truncated) multilingualism since it facilitated the process of living with maintained

differences. They saw themselves contributing to embracing linguistic and semiotic differences in translation, thus facilitating communication or, more generally, interaction. In practice, this often only involved features ‘learned in passing’, which is characteristic of phatic communion and thus temporary conviviality.

This observation is highly relevant for the question of multilingualism in relation to social hierarchies. As in Augustin Sambou’s case, disempowered subject positions are situational. While he kept afloat in most social situations applying his wide repertoire, with the mechanic he failed at achieving both phatic communion and the desired economic outcome. Thus, while in the economic field multilingualism is a tactical choice to mediate unfavourable structural conditions and it may fail, in public spaces phatic communion can be created by the same people through the playful exchange of non-propositional language drawing on wide repertoires. In the latter case, conviviality, peaceful living with maintained difference, and the experience of relative situational equality are at stake, while in the former, truncated multilingualism resembles an economic investment.

Substantial differences and power disparities always entail the possibility of failure impeding the inherent translation process of polylanguaging. Cultural differences deriving from ethnic competition or competing language ideologies are closely related to, and mask questions of power. This was the case of the mechanic implicitly imposing the use of Wolof in Casamance, and the tactical use of Catalan by both Aboubacar and Idrissa. However, when phatic communion is established by creatively drawing from a wide repertoire and skillfully handling language ideologies, the situational

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salience of social hierarchies is temporarily reduced. For continued conviviality, Casamançais were adjusting to changing situations and contexts, which their truncated multilingualism reflected. While in this paper I have stressed the importance of language ideologies which emphasise underlying cultural, national, and ethnic differences, practising multilingualism and achieving phatic communion depends on competently addressing further social and economic differences. Variations in registers and style which Idrissa combined, for example, offered initial, but important insights into these dynamics.

Exploring multilingual practices and representations on a spectrum between coping tactic and phatic communion taking the crucial role of language ideologies into account has proven a productive way of understanding the polylanguaging of residents who live in diversified localities and remain different, yet often maintain conviviality. The process of conviviality spans both these aspects describing ever-dynamic and ever-fragile ways of living with difference.

NOTES1 I wish to thank participants at the

conference Language practices, migration and labour: ethnographing economies in urban diversities at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, 9-10/10/2012 for very helpful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Errors remain all mine.

2 I matched a sample of mainly male migrants and their relatives and friends. The fieldwork lasted for about 18 months between 2009 and 2010, equally split between Catalonia and Casamance. While I recorded 66 open-ended interviews, much of the presented material stems from informal conversations that are only documented

in my fieldnotes, which explains the lack of direct quotations.

3 To also systematically take transit spaces as further influencing contexts into account could be promising, but lies beyond the scope of my material.

4 ‘Agreement to live together. National Agreement on Immigration.’ (from Catalan).

5 All names have been changed. However, the first name shows the Christian or Muslim faith of an informant, while the last name indicates the real ethnic origins of the person. Where the latter is crucial for the analysis, the ethnicity is additionally mentioned separately.

6 Interviews of a Moroccan and sub-Saharan African published online support this fact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkA2CJASaiY [accessed 09/11/2012]).

7 Elsewhere, I more extensively discuss the aspects of cultural translation and the inherently comparative perspectives of migrants (cf. Heil 2013, 2014b).

8 Compañera/o is Castilian, company/a Catalan, and camarada exists in both.

9 It is likely that he consciously mentioned Jola well aware of the local rivalry of Jola and Mandinka speaking Casamançais in both Casamance and Catalonia.

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The focus on ‘unimportant’ language in this collection is driven by major

contemporary questions. In conditions of superdiversity, the old binaries—minority/majority, migrant/host etc.—can no longer account for the splits and alignments emerging in globalised environments and in response, social scientists have turned their attention to informal processes, seeking new principles for social cohesion in low-key local ‘conviviality’ (Gilroy 2006; Vertovec 2007; Wetherell 2009). Along similar lines, commentators point to the decline of traditional party politics and look instead to social media and digital communication as new resources for grassroots mobilisation. So does the communication of apparently trivial matters really hold the seeds to social renewal, or are such ideas romantically over-inflated?

The papers provide a range of answers to questions of this kind, and I won’t try to summarise their nuanced formulations, or to endorse or challenge their substantive claims. But whatever their conclusions, ‘conviviality’ and ‘phatic communication’ play a major part in the discussion; and in what follows, I will comment on how and where I think these notions are problematic or productive. My remarks are largely

methodological, dwelling in particular on the challenges of working across social processes of different scale, though I will conclude with some notes on surveillance, a (substantive) issue that in sociolinguistics is often underplayed.

WORKING ACROSS PROCESSES OF DIFFERENT SCALEThe papers in this collection draw on different disciplinary backgrounds—ethnographic sociolinguistics, anthro-pology, and sociology. Small and apparently inconsequential pieces of language constitute the central theme, but they are situated in processes that are very different in scale. So we have face-to-face interaction unfolding from one moment to the next (Goebel), case study descriptions of the everyday lives and/or biographies of individuals (Velghe and Heil), and the widespread circulation of digital texts (Varis and Blommaert). The multi-scalarity of this combination of perspectives is very well justified in Blommaert and Varis’s introduction:

the social structures we address... are… emergent structures character-ising an evolving social order—the

Conviviality and phatic communion?

Ben RamptonKing’s College London

Centre for Language Discourse & Communication

© Rampton and CMDR. 2015


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stability of which is permanently under pressure because of the diversity of people and activities that co-construct it. (…) Looking at the lowest everyday level at which such co-construction proceeds is a tactic employed by Goffman, Blumer, Cicourel and other scholars of an earlier generation, who were dissatisfied with structuralist a priori assumptions about order and stability in social systems, and who assumed that every degree of social order rests on the continuous iterative and made-meaningful enactment of characteristics of such order in everyday behaviour. We share that assumption as well as its methodological consequence: that micro-research is at once macro-research, in which a precise understanding of the macro-structures of social life can, and often does, reside in at first inspection insignificant details of people’s social behaviour – such as ‘unimportant language’ usage (p. 7).

As Goffman (1963: 70) notes, ‘[w]hether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact, even here putting us in our place’. In sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, it is now fairly well recognised that although the conditions in which people communicate are partly local and emergent, continuously readjusted to the contingencies of action unfolding from one moment to the next, they are also infused with information, resources, expectations and experiences that originate in, circulate through, and/or are destined for networks, media and processes that can be very different in their reach and duration (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Scollon and Scollon 2004; Blommaert 2005). As analysts, we can vary the scope of what we focus on, looking,

for example, at the structure—the organisation of beginnings, middles and ends, the composition of segments etc.—of very brief processes like sentences, at the structure of longer ones like genres such as the medical consultation, at the structure of the institutional networks through which medical records, for example, travel, and/or at the structure of medical careers, as well as at the links between these processual systems, which can themselves sometimes be quite stable, at least for a while. But as soon as we turn to action and meaning, we are confronted by all the contingency intrinsic to human conduct. In making sense of their situations, people process a huge range of semiotic signs and systems, bringing their understanding of all sorts of different structures to bear (material, linguistic, interactional, institutional, historical, etc.). At this point, the best that we can get from our analytic models of how processes at one, two or even three levels normally hold together, is an initial heuristic for exploring what is going on, and we are thrown into the unpredictable particularity that ethnography has taught to accept (cf. Blommaert 2013: 11-12).

This has at least two implications for the present collection.

First, if we are working across processes that differ in their duration and reach, we should not expect concepts that work reasonably well at one level/scale to continue to be useful when we shift up or down to others. It is obvious—partly because the analytic vocabularies are often different—that when a sociolinguist moves from describing the structure of T-sounds to the structure of particular communicative genres, the precise phonetic details become largely irrelevant, even though T-sounds continue to play a small but significant part in genre enactment. But there are concepts with domains of application

85Conviviality and phatic communion


that are less clear cut and that generate apparently conflicting claims when they’re used at different levels. One such term is ‘phatic’.

According to Crystal (2008: 360), ‘phatic’ refers to ‘language used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than exchanging information and ideas (e.g. comments on the weather, or enquiries about health)’. Leech (1981: 41) describes it as the function of ‘keeping communication lines open, and keeping social relationships in good repair (talking about the weather in British culture). . . [I]t is not so much what one says, but the fact that one says it at all, that matters’. He goes on to say that phatic language ‘has its parallels in public affairs. Everyone is familiar with occasions when statesmen and politicians make public utterances which are elaborate ways of saying nothing’, and he gives the example of President Kennedy’s inaugural speech, saying that in this speech, ‘the informational function of language is reduced to a minimum’ (1981: 54–55). But contrast this with Goebel’s excellent micro-analysis of repetition, where for example it is only when the phrase ‘a place name’ is repeated by Slamet in line 34 of Extract 4.3 that it is informationally redundant and appears to be primarily associated with ‘ongoing relationship building efforts’. Here the account attends to the given/new dynamic in linguistic exchange, and we are entering a delicate level of analysis where the referential and affiliative functions normally operate together in linguistic production and where it is only at very particular points in the unfolding of interaction that semantic significance recedes and the relational dimension comes to the fore. Indeed, this is very much in line with Goffman’s account of interaction ritual. Ritual concerns—concerns about ‘keeping social

relationships in good repair’—pervade all talk (as politeness theory affirms), and it is only in a relatively limited class of conventionalised utterances that the referential dimension of language ceases to matter.1 If we were to take this powerful micro-perspective back to what Leech says about Kennedy’s speech being phatic, we would have to believe that the President simply hummed or scatted through the inauguration.

The conclusion of the linguist Stephen Levinson is that functional schemes that include notions like phatic are ‘of dubious utility to the pragmatist. . .: the categories are of vague application, they do not have direct empirical motivation, and there are many other rival schemes built upon slightly different lines’ (1983: 41). But if we follow Levinson and reject ‘phatic’, what do we do when the word plays a central part in Varis and Blommaert’s account of collectivity in social media? Do we adopt a foundationalist stance and say that nobody should do any social science until we have sorted out the communicative basics? Or do we accept that the clarity and stability of ‘facts’ always dissolve when scientific specialists get close to their object of enquiry, and learn to live with some indeterminacy?

We need to take the latter course, and welcome ‘phatic’ as a helpful overarching umbrella that allows Varis and Blommaert to consider how the ‘new online world offers numerous invitations for unthinking and rethinking semiotic truths’. Of course they treat ‘phatic’ as a term that requires further specification and one can retrieve the microscope to argue with how they do so. Their Zuckerberg update isn’t simply visual—there is plenty of propositional content that’s available to sharers, even though they may not engage with it on first encounter.2 But judicious broad-brush characterisation of the kind sought by

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Varis and Blommaert is just as important to multilevel analysis as intensive fine-grained dissection of the type achieved by Goebel.

Quantification may be an alternative or additional resource for empirical generalisation, especially with digital media, but because the contingencies that shape local sense-making are so complex, it is useful only as a rudimentary pointer. So yes, if you are studying text messaging in South Africa, you might count the number of texts that people send in Cape Town and infer from their linguistic surface that they are all about casual sociability. But Velghe’s account of the perseverance and protracted battle with literacy that lies behind Linda’s text messages shows just how valuable it is for empirical work to move back and forth across processes of different scale, combining linguistic analysis with participant observation, for example. This movement is not just about holding big generalisations to account with particular cases (Harris and Rampton 2009: 116-17). It also involves production of the nuanced but inevitably approximative syntheses that we call general interpretation, where terms like ‘phatic’—or ‘informational’, or ‘aesthetic’—may very well be useful. Indeed, this kind of epistemological flexibility is intrinsic to linguistic ethnography (Rampton, Maybin, and Roberts 2014), which holds that:

i. the contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed. Meaning takes shape within specific social relations, interactional histories and institutional regimes, produced and construed by agents with expectations and repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically;

ii. analysis of the internal organisation of verbal (and other kinds of semiotic) data is essential to understanding its significance and position in the

world. Meaning is far more than just the ‘expression of ideas’ and biography, identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signalled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain.

My second methodological point follows on from this: we need to be very careful with the term ‘convivial’. Whether or not small talk can be characterised as convivial will very much depend on the contingencies of where, when, how, by and to whom it is produced. Heil makes this very clear in his description of educated Casamançais feeling ‘appalled by unpleasant working-class small talk’, even though they feel bad about ‘their disdain and mockery of their neighbours’ repertoires and their own lack of respect this portrayed’. If we take Goebel’s list of types of action that count as small talk—giving and receiving compliments, the exchange of a joke for laughter, repetition and non-minimal responses—common experience tells us that there are lots of circumstances in which these are double-edged, sarcastic, patronising and offensive. Equally, there is nothing intrinsically convivial about ‘polylanguaging’ and the use of local languages you don’t really know. Certainly, it can be convivial in circumstances of the kind described, for example, by Wise and Velayutham (2014)—living in the same locality, sharing the same spaces, supported both by key individuals who bring different types of people and by an intercultural habitus willing to adapt to differences. But there are plenty of studies emphasising the context-sensitivity of poly-/trans-languaging—its sensitivity to processes and relations beyond the purely linguistic—and it can often also be an expression of hostility (Hewitt 1986; Rampton 1995). In fact there are no forms of communication that are



inalienably convivial and this simply follows from the fact that although it is a very valuable part of the puzzle, you can never get at what people mean through language alone.

But if conviviality and the practice of small talk can’t be equated, does this mean that we should abandon the term as a characterisation of the social worlds in focus in this collection?

Vis-à-vis life online, my feeling is that ‘phatic’ is a safer term to use, for the reasons stated above. Off-line, however, in discussions of globalised urban superdiversity, the idea of ‘conviviality’ has gained a good deal of consensual weight, and I’d like to suggest that instead of being an adequate analytic characterisation of everyday practice, ‘conviviality’ describes a particular local ideology, though this needs to be very carefully contextualised in at least three ways. First, its relationship with other ideologies, both local and national, needs to be addressed. From Heil’s informant Augustin Sambou, we have a clear view of conviviality’s power as a reflexive representation of local life, but it is in tension with the ideologies of class influencing Aboubacar Diao and it looks distinct from the authoritative knowledge of Mandinka language and culture that Idrissa Samaté also invests in. Elsewhere, Back identifies a broadly comparable ‘harmony discourse’ in South London, but he examines its relationship with ideologies of black community and white flight (1996: Ch. 5), and Gilroy makes it clear that conviviality ‘cannot banish conflict… and should not signify the absence of racism’ (2006: 39-40).

Second, an account of conviviality-as-ideology needs to rest on a description of the shared spaces and everyday projects which make ethnic and linguistic difference subsidiary to getting on with practical activity. Explicit articulations of convivial ideology may well emerge

at points where ordinary routines are troubled or interrupted, but if we neglect these routines in our descriptions, we end up with an account that makes the people we associate with conviviality sound like smiley multiculturalist ‘hands-across-the-divide’, which they’re not—they are ordinary people trying to get on with their lives (Eley 2015).

Third, the collocation of ‘conviviality’ and ‘coping’ in the papers by Heil and Velghe is very necessary to bring out this ideology’s optimism-against-the-odds and subaltern political significance. After all, the varsity larks of Boris Johnson and David Cameron in the Bullingdon Club were also rather convivial and it is important not to mix them up.

WHAT ABOUT SURVEILLANCE?I would like to close this discussant commentary on a different tack, with a few quick comments about surveillance, an issue that speaks to the questions of linkage and connection addressed in the collection, but that is rather overlooked, not only here but in the sociolinguistics of superdiversity more generally (though see Arnaut 2012).

The onset of globalised superdiversity in recent times is often linked to the early 1990s (e.g. Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 2). But this period is also associated with emergence of a huge transnational field of security professionals, which is ‘larger than that of police organizations in that it includes, on one hand private corporations and organizations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War’ (Bigo 2002: 63-64). In this context, migration and superdiversity are

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increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services, armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to ‘law and order’.… The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear especially transfer the legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets, most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents (Bigo ibid).

And while the development of new communication technologies has major implications for the maintenance and development of diasporic networks and other types of collectivity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011: 4; Tall 2004), it obviously also plays a major role in surveillance. Observers note that superdiversity presents a major challenge to the traditional forms of social classification with which states and institutions monitor their populations. Scholars argue that instead of relying on essentialist identity categories, research should focus on practices. But with ‘transactional surveillance’, digital technologies overcome these problems:

[s]ubjects… are very active consuming, swiping credit cards, walking streets, phoning. These activities and transactions are an

immediate interaction with and through technology. The interaction creates data that are used to govern subjects and their activities… As Amoore and de Goede state in their exploration of the increasing importance of transactions for security practice and its political implications: ‘[T]ransactions people make are, quite literally, taken to be traces of daily life, they are conceived as a way of mapping, visualising and recognising bodies in movement’ (2008: 176). Ruppert and Savage speak of transactional governance (2011). While traditional data sources engage subjects as identities or fixed populations, transactional governance derives information directly from the interactions and transactions. ‘Subjectivity or identity is less an issue and instead associations and correlations in conduct are deemed more empirical and descriptive than subjective and meaningful’ (Ruppert 2011: 228). Transactional governance decentres subjects into transactions: what matters is not subjects with opinions or identities but transactions that take place. It is a mode of governing that seeks to quickly adapt delivery of services, control and coercion to changing behaviours deriving and processing information directly from the everyday ‘doings’ of people. Transactional surveillance is increasingly important in security practice (Huysmans 2014: 166-67).

All this has at least three implications. First, it changes our understanding of the light-weight informational emptiness of phatic communication. Velghe gives a glimpse of this when she describes the jealous boyfriend’s suspicion of Lisa’s text messaging and the rows that her phatic practices generate, but this can be massively scaled up to security



surveillance organisations like the NSA and GCHQ, which after all, only process the metadata in our emails—who they are to and what the subject header says—not the contents of the messages themselves. The afterlife of any electronic text, phatic or otherwise, can be very different from its producer’s initial intentions (Blommaert 2001) and in social media, the problems are especially acute. Second and more briefly, the temptation to look for conviviality in contemporary superdiversity—to dwell on creative translingual sociability or polylingual business-oriented improvisation—needs to be tempered by attention to fear, unease and their systematic cultivation as modes of control (Khan 2014). And following on from this, third, it is important to ensure that sociolinguists’ theoretical attraction to Bakhtin is balanced by an extended engagement with Foucault, who remains a central figure in contemporary studies of security. With heteroglossia and the carnivalesque, Bakhtin speaks straight to the interests of sociolinguistics, but with ‘governmentality’ as a capillary web of small-scale practices that deliberately ‘attempt to shape conduct in certain ways in relation to certain objectives’, Foucault can too (Rose 1999: 4; Foucault 1978/2003; Rampton 2014).

NOTES1 ‘a special class of quite conventionalised

utterances, lexicalisations whose controlling purpose is to give praise, blame, thanks, support, affection or show gratitude, disapproval, dislike, sympathy, or greet, say farewell and so forth. Part of the force of these speech acts comes from the feelings they directly index; little of the force derives from the semantic content of the words’ (Goffman 1981: 20-21).

2 Indeed, elaborating like, for example Levinson 1988 or Irvine 1996, it would be worth exploring the extent to which Goffman’s later work on footing and participation frameworks could be extended in a unified analysis of ‘likes’ and ‘sharing’, with, for example, the distinction between virality and memicity connecting with Goffman’s account of ‘responses’ and ‘replies’ (Goffman 1981).

REFERENCESAmoore, Louise and Marieke de Goede.

2008. Transactions after 9/11: The banal face of the preemptive strike. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2): 173-85.

Arnaut, Karel. 2012. Super-diversity: Elements of an emerging perspective. Diversities 14 (2): 1-16.

Back, Les. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture. London: UCL Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1987. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: Texas University Press.

Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.

Bigo, Didier. 2002. Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27: 63-92.

Blommaert, Jan and Ben Rampton. 2011. Language and superdiversity: A position paper. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 70. London: King’s College Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. <https://www.academia.edu/6356809/WP70_Blommaert_and_Rampton_2011._Language_and_superdiversity_A_position_paper>.

Blommaert, Jan. 2001. Context is/as critique. Critique of Anthropology 21 (1): 13-32.

Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Crystal, David. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eley, Louise. 2015. A micro-ecology of language in multi-ethnic Frankfurt: The linguistic ethnography of a barbershop. Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, Paper 155. London: King’s College Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. <https://www.academia.edu/11365690/WP155_Eley_2015._A_microecology_of_language_in_multi-ethnic_Frankfurt_The_linguistic_ethnography_of_a_barbershop>

Foucault, Michel. 1978/2003. Governmentality. In Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (eds). The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. New York: The New Press. 229-245.

Gilroy, Paul. 2006. Multiculture in times of war: An inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics. Critical Quarterly 48 (4): 27-45.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.

Harris, Roxy and Ben Rampton. 2009. Ethnicities without guarantees: An empirical approach. In Margaret Wetherell (ed). Identity in the 21st Century: New Trends in Changing Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 95-119.

Hewitt, Roger. 1986. White Talk, Black Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huysmans, Jef. 2014. Security Unbound. London: Routledge.

Irvine, Judith T. 1996. Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles. In Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (eds). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 131-59.

Khan, Kamran. 2014. Citizenship, securitization and suspicion in UK ESOL policy. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 130. London:

King’s College Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. <https://www.academia.edu/7517562/WP130_Khan_2014._Citizenship_securitization_and_suspicion_in_UK_ESOL_policy>

Leech, Geoffrey. 1981. Semantics: The Study of Meaning. Second Edition. Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen. 1988. Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s concepts of participation. In Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds). Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order. Oxford: Polity Press. 161-227.

Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents. London: Longman. (2nd Edition 2005: St Jerome Press.) <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/ldc/publications/Crossing.aspx>

Rampton, Ben. 2014. Gumperz and governmentality in the 21st century: Interaction, power and subjectivity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 136. London: King’s College Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. <https://www.academia.edu/8114068/WP136_Rampton_2014._Gumperz_and_governmentality_in_the_21st_century_Interaction_power_and_subjectivity>

Rampton, Ben, Janet Maybin, and Celia Roberts. 2014. Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 125. London: King’s College Centre for Language Discourse & Communication. <https://www.academia.edu/6155510/WP125_Rampton_Maybin_and_Roberts_2014._Methodological_foundations_in_linguistic_ethnography>

Rose, Nikolas. 1999. The Power of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ruppert, Evelyn. 2011. Population objects: Interpassive subjects. Sociology 45 (2): 218-33.

Ruppert, Evelyn and Mike Savage. 2011. Transactional politics. Sociological Review 59 (2): 73-92.



Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge.

Tall, Serigne Mansour. 2004. Senegalese émigrés: New information and communication technologies. Review of African Political Economy 99: 31-48.

Vertovec, Steven. 2007. New Complexities of Cohesion in Britain: Superdiversity, Transnationalism and Civil-Integration. University of Oxford: COMPAS.

Wetherell, Margaret. 2009. Introduction: Negotiating liveable lives: Identity and intelligibility in contemporary Britain. Identity in the 21st Century: New Trends in Changing Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 1-21.

Wise, Amanda and Selvaraj Velayutham. 2014. Conviviality in everyday multiculturalism: Some brief comparisons between Singapore and Sydney. European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (4): 406-430.

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In the “Acknowledgements” to Sociolinguistics and mobile communication,

Deumert comments that during the writing process, the text “developed a life of its own” and took her on a journey to places, both theoretical and virtual, which she had not anticipated (p. x). What makes her book such a pleasure to read is that it takes her audience on the same journey, now carefully planned and crafted to ensure maximum coherence, interest and accessibility.

The ‘terrain’ is the emerging field of mobile- (or computer-) mediated communication and the ‘guides’ are what Deumert refers to as the ‘ancestors’ of much contemporary intellectual thought: scholars such as Bakhtin, Jakobson, Goffman, Barthes and Derrida, whose research has influenced and shaped the study of language and communication over the past century, and more recently, the field of sociolinguistics. She argues that we do not need a fundamentally new theory of sociolinguistics (or anthropology, or sociology) to understand online practices; rather we should revisit these seminal texts and reread them through the lens of digital communication. In a very engaging and accessible style, this book reviews a range of key concepts and theories from the past and uses these to explore the nature of contemporary

mobile communication in terms of three central organising themes: mobility, creativity, and inequality.

The book’s central argument (and, I would argue, its most interesting theoretical contribution) is that creativity should be viewed as fundamental not only to digital language, but to language in general. Traditionally, linguists have argued for a view of language as an ordered, structured system governed by norms and conventions, and creativity as an inherently rule-governed process. Through her analysis of online texts (and with reference to Jakobson’s poetic function), Deumert makes a strong case for viewing all linguistic and semiotic creativity as open-ended and highly original. For example, she shows how the texting practices of young South African participants include unconventional spellings and localised initialisms, sometimes realised in ‘ornamental’, non-standard forms which emphasise the visuality of language. These creative and artful practices, she argues, allow digital writers to style particular online identities and index various stances and degrees of emotional intensity. She then extends this argument to traditional offline linguistic play, such as the poetry of the early twentieth century avant-garde Futurist movement, and argues

Review of Sociolinguistics and mobile communication by Ana

Deumert

Zannie BockLinguistics Department, University of the Western Cape

© Bock and CMDR. 2015


93Review: Sociolinguistics and mobile communication


that speakers and writers both online and offline should be seen as refashioning and not just reproducing semiotic and linguistic signs. She quotes Derrida’s observation that “signs are never closed, but can always be manipulated, twisted, changed” (p.171) and, drawing on Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, argues that all language is liquid i.e. immensely pliable, flexible and fluid (p. 144).

Each chapter introduces a set of theoretical lenses, which afford multiple perspectives on the complex phenomenon of mobile communication. Chapter One positions the book within the emerging field of media sociolinguistics, sets the frame for the book, and introduces the key theoretical interests and arguments (mobility, creativity and inequality). Chapter Two uses Goffman’s notion of the interaction order to explore how digital communication facilitates the mobility of people, ideas and semiotic resources across time and space. It also raises some important ethical and methodological issues. Chapter Three explores the theme of inequality and refers to a range of literature which demonstrates how differential access – the outcome of unequal economic conditions – enables or constrains different kinds of online practices. For example, in Africa, where most users do not have access to fast bandwidth and large computer screens, online communication relies more heavily on text as opposed to the multimedia creations typical of youth in more affluent societies like the US. Chapter Four continues the theme of inequality and surveys global digital culture from the perspective of multilingualism. Here Deumert asks which languages are most visible online and concludes that, with the exception of a handful of powerful languages (topped predictably by English) mostly from

the global north (with the exception of Chinese); the vast majority of the world’s languages remain invisible. One of the case studies in this chapter is a very interesting study of Wikipedia based on both published work as well as her own research. Her analysis of the isiXhosa wiki pages draws attention to the ways in which this site reproduces rather than challenges unequal global power relations and reinscribes the marginality of isiXhosa online. In this way, her book serves the important counter function of making isiXhosa and other African languages visible in this growing field.

Chapter Five returns to the theme of mobility (of texts and voices) and takes Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality as core theoretical concepts. Through an analysis of how YouTube videos are creatively remixed and reworked, she develops her argument that all signs are multivocal with multiple meanings. Once again, this chapter includes her own analysis of an online isiXhosa lesson on clicks and shows how material may be taken up and interpreted by audiences in unexpected ways. In this case, comments on the site indicate how some visitors interpret the lesson through a frame of Western imaginings of ‘exotic’ African beauty and sexual desire. Thus, she argues, meanings emerge dialogically and interactively, in ways often beyond the author’s control; and, drawing on Derrida’s notion of iterability, all signs are in fact resignifications (not merely repetitions) of earlier signs. Chapter Six expands on these ideas by exploring how users of social media take up and refashion different ‘social voices’ by inflecting and ‘twisting’ them in different ways. She uses Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to explore how mobile communication is characterised by both centripetal (conventionalised patterns and forms) and centrifugal forces (artful,

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hybrid forms and practices) to argue that “the fundamental heteroglossic nature of language” provides speakers with the multilingual resources essential to creativity (p. 121).

In Chapter Seven, Deumert arguably reaches the ‘high point’ of her journey. This is a fascinating account of ‘textpl@y as poetic language’. This chapter explores the enormous variability and innovation that occurs in online communication as users play with linguistic form, layout, typography and orthography. In this chapter, she develops her central argument (as outlined in the third paragraph above) on the centrality of creativity to the nature of language, both online and offline. Once again, this chapter includes reference to her own work on isiXhosa and through a comparison with published research, she makes the interesting argument that in Africa, where texting practices tend to be characterised by a high degree of multilingualism, mobile texts reveal a high level of abbreviations and shortenings for messages which are written in the former colonial languages but show considerably more standard spellings for writing in the local languages. According to her data, participants argues that the local languages need more ‘respect’ and that the extra care that it takes to write messages ‘in full’ indexes a level of ‘care’ and ‘seriousness’ which is more suitable for certain topics (such as declarations of serious love as opposed to flirting). They therefore reflect an identity rooted in local traditions, while English, by comparison, evokes a transgressive global post-modernity and allows for freedom and ‘linguistic whateverism’ (p. 138).

Chapter Eight shifts the focus from textual forms back to social practices again and takes up the primacy of the relational function of texting and its role in the lives of the users for creating a sense of connectedness, community

and online visibility. However, Deumert gives this topic a new take by using Barthes’s distinction between plaisir and jouissance to explore the notion of sociability. The former concept is glossed as referring to the comforting, cheering pleasure that strengthens social bonds and the latter to a quite different, unsettling enjoyment which derives from acts known to be inappropriate and offensive, but which nonetheless elicit laughter and mirth. In her analysis of several transgressive online sites, Deumert productively employs Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque in a way which once again illustrates the value of the classic theories to our understanding of digitally mediated communication.

The final chapter draws together the different threads of the book and revisits what an analysis of mobile communication reveals about language in relation to the organising themes of mobility, creativity and inequality. She concludes that this perspective allows us to see that intertextuality, heteroglossia, performance and the poetic function are central to language and meaning making and that contemporary sociolinguistics should recognise more fully the central role of creativity and artful performance in everyday language practices.

The book covers an impressive range of scholarship, both recent work on computer mediated communication as well as more established foundational concepts and theories. In making her arguments, Deumert draws on an extensive review of published literature as well as her own research on South African texting styles and practices among speakers of isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English. In this respect, it is a significant contribution to the field as it reflects ‘southern’ experience and scholarship in a field dominated by research from the north. In sum, the book is theoretically

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grounded, reflects a thorough and comprehensive reading of the field, and contributes a new, interesting and relevant theoretical perspective to the field.

The pleasure of reading was further heightened by the book’s lucid and readable style. Theoretical concepts are carefully and accessibly explained with concrete illustrative examples. The content is organised into thematically coherent chapters which are well structured with helpful introductions and conclusions. It also includes a very useful index. I would suggest that this book is essential reading for every scholar of language

and communication, sociolinguistics and the media. It provides a very helpful and interesting overview of seminal concepts in the field and offers the reader a set of theoretically productive ideas to think about and analyse their own data and contexts.

REFERENCESAna Deumert. 2014. Sociolinguistics and

mobile communication. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press.

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Although the volume was published in 2010, it still remains one of the

most important contributions to a new field of enquiry in the study of language and signage in public spaces initially conceptualised and institutionalised by Landry and Bourhis (1997) as linguistic landscapes (LL). They defined linguistic landscapes as “[t]he language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration” (p. 25). As the title of the volume suggests, the aim was to extend the study to consider other semiotic material in place rather than linguistic ones alone. Jaworski and Thurlow prefer the term semiotic landscapes to LL to account for the fact that descriptions of space are not just about language, image and space, but more so about how interlocutors engage with semiotic material including objects in place.

The volume has an introduction by the two editors followed by 13 chapters covering a range of topics and contributions by some of the major

scholars in linguistic/semiotic landscapes studies.

The introduction by Jaworski and Thurlow introduces semiotic landscapes as a new area of enquiry, focusing on the interaction between language, image and space—especially how culture and textual mediation are implicated in the discursive and multimodal construction of space. In setting the background, the editors make it clear within a few paragraphs that the aim was to try to extend the conceptualisation of landscapes beyond what was premised in Landry and Bourhis (1997) and other earlier studies, which had focused on often out-of-context survey and questionnaire data. Their interest is the intersection of visual discourse, language and socio-cultural aspects of spatial practices. As also seen from the title, the volume owes much to Kress and Van Leuwen’s (2006) notion of multimodality in which language is just one of many semiotic modes used for representation and communication. Additionally, they draw on Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) geosemiotics and Harvey’s (2006) dynamic conceptualization of space as a consequence of human interaction practice—that is, space is invented through human interactions with signs in place.

Review of Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow

Felix Banda Linguistics Department, University of the Western Cape

© Banda and CMDR. 2015


97Review: Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space


Jaworski and Thurlow are critical of LL studies and a number of stances put forward in such scholarship, including the predominantly quantitative and survey based data. Ironically, Jaworski and Thurlow acknowledge that the majority of chapters in the volume are on LL, that is, written language in place rather semiotic landscapes as proposed in their introduction. They propose a more genre- and context-specific study of language in the landscape of texts. On the whole the introduction gives an excellent assessment of LL studies and offers directions including relevant literature for the study of semiotic landscapes.

Chapter 1, written by Jeffery Kallen, takes issue with the ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ dichotomy often made in earlier LL studies such as Ben-Rafael et al. (2006). He notes that official and non-oficial languages/signage are not neccessaily hierachical as they operate in different domains or parallel universes. Using data from Dublin’s semiotic landscapes, Kallen goes on to suggest five (which he extends to seven) spatial frameworks in which to analyse signage: civic, marketplace, portals, walls and detritus zones (and also community and the school). These, he argues, constitute the complementary systems or domains in which to consume signage. He concludes that, although one finds many bilingual English-Irish signs, the landscapes are dominated by English. However, one also finds signage in Polish, Chinese and French, which he attributes to immigration, international tourism and business.

Mark Sebba contributes the second chapter, which looks at ‘mobile’ public texts as found on banknotes, pamphlets, tickets, vehicles, and so on. He suggests that both fixed and ‘unfixed’ signage need to be analysed in the same way as kinds of discourse in context. Second,

using the dominance of Afrikaans and English in the apartheid South Africa’s landscapes, Sebba argues that the white population erased African languages from public spaces. This ideological and social engineering of space was designed to prop up Afrikaans as being equal in status to English. The reality, however, was that whereas Afrikaans had more status in rural areas, English remained the language of status in business circles and urban areas. Third, the ideological project of making English and Afrikaans visible had little impact on the linguistic diversity on the ground where various African languages continued to be spoken.

In chapter 3, Nikolas Coupland argues that the presence of Welsh in Wales’ LL reflects an idealised political and ideological perspective of ‘true bilingualism’ rather than ‘any objective realities of bilingual usage’ (p. 79). He then concludes that the bilingual signage reflect the ‘top-down’ aspect of language planning in Wales.

In an interesting contribution, Susan Dray’s chapter 4 explores the use of non-standard language in the semiotic landscapes of Jamaica. Dray’s focus is the interplay and influence of Jamaican creole on the national landscapes. From the outset it is clear that what constitutes standard and non-standard English in the Jamaican contexts is not always clear-cut. She gives an example of official government signage often re-appropriating what could be considered non-standard forms of English (such as ‘Walk good’) in some of its messages. Even Dray’s linguistics students considered ‘Walk good’ a standard Jamaican English form. Reminiscent of what Stroud and Mpendukana (2009, 2010) have called signs of neccessity, Dray finds a lot of innovation and resourcefulness in Jamaicans’ re-using of materials such as corrugated zinc doors

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for signage. As Dray correctly notes, the use of repurposed material (Bolter and Grusin 2000) should not be seen as a sign of lack of authority; rather it reflects the resourcefulness which is commonplace in Jamaica and indeed Africa. Although standard English and Jamaican creole remain in hegemonic existence, the latter is increasingly gaining visual presence in the visual public domains so that there are times when the non-standard form is seen as the legitimate and preferred code. In essence, standard English and Jamaican creole represent the different and complementary identity options available to Jamaicans.

Chapter 5 is about what Ingrid Piller describes as the sexualisation of travel-related public spaces in Basel, Switzerland. Drawing data from shop fronts, local newspaper adverts, websites selling ‘prostitutes’, nightclubs and escort services, Piller explores the intersection between the semiotics of the sex industry and the semiotics of Swiss tourism. She shows that high levels of mobility are connected to high visibility of the sex industry, which also linked to high quality and multilingual construction of the upper class Swiss national identity.

Alastair Pennycook contributes chapter 6, in which he characterises graffiti as integral to semiotic landscapes in city-scapes. Pennycook introduces several notions drawn from a number of disciplines, which would be useful to theorising and studying semiotic landscapes. Some of the concepts are graffscapes (graffiti in space), gaze, ‘walk-in’ navigation of space, urban cityscapes, counter-literacies and cultural flows. He also characterises semiotic landscapes in terms of spatial narrations. Drawing on Cannadine (2000: 8), Pennycook contributes a different way of conceiving space when he argues that people reshape the environment during landscaping. He also argues that semiotic landscaping is a

conscious act and that space is always under construction, so that it is invented. In a way, Pennycook’s contribution appears to extend the scope of semiotic landscapes beyond what Jaworski and Thurlow proposed in the introduction. In arguing for narration of place, Pennycook expands the ‘scenery’ to include environmental material (trees, grass, mounds, etc.) and/or how these are reused in the reshaping of place.

This is followed by a chapter by Rodney H. Jones who investigates the different ways teenagers use computers at school and home in Hong Kong. His interest is in the differential effect computers have in governing how students orient themselves in these spaces and toward other people in the vicinity. He notes that in the home, the students’ computer use or discourse in place included conversations with familiy and related to activities taking place in the environment. Magazines, newspapers and other objects often attract the gaze. Whereas in the home the orientation was polyfocal, students’ orientation in the school environment tended towards being monofocal as a result of school-based literacy practices reinforced by the panopticon style setting (Foucault 1977) of a traditional classroom in which students sit at ‘long tables arranged in rows…’ (p. 160).

Chapter 8 by Thomas Mitchell looks at how a newspaper article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was framed in such a manner so as to put a wedge between new Latino immigrants and established ‘traditional’ inhabitants of Beechview. Mitchell finds that the article did this through exploiting common metaphors of Othering: immigration as an ‘invasion’ and as a ‘flood’. He contends that the presence of Spanish in the semiotic landscapes may have contributed to the newspaper exaggerating the actual number of immigrants living in Beechview.

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Chapter 9 by Thurlow and Jaworski draws on the idea of elite closure, to show how silence as a discursive and social construct is used as semiotic resource in high-end adverts and as a marker of luxury and social status in commercial representations of social space. They see what they call an ‘anti-communicational’ ethos or commodification of silence in luxury tourism adverts as encoding an elitist ideology of ‘segregation and isolationism’ (p. 212).

In chapter 10, Abousnnouga and Machin problematises war monuments as semiotic resources on which government legitimise discourses of nation, nationalism and the virtues of militerism. In turn, they use multimodal discourse analysis to show how the English/British government continues erecting new war monuments while sprucing up old ones with new names of (‘forgotten’) ‘fallen’ soldiers, to disseminate certain values, identities, goals and politically-driven motives.

Continuing with the theme of monuments, Shohamy and Waksman (chapter 11) characterise monuments as ideological sites of discourses of nation and nationalism, and as places of tourism and immigration. They focus on the Ha’apala monument in the city of Tel Aviv, which has become a place in which texts and discourses of the Jewish ideology and nationhood are produced and consumed. The place has also become a site of ownership of space and redefinition of Others, reinforcement of collective identity, shared traumatic past and a site for a shared future recruitment of the private for the public.

In chapter 12, Gendelman and Aiello look at façades as semiotic resources in global capitalism. Their interest is in how city spaces and infrastructure are deployed as media of communication in the global marketplace. In this idiom, buildings become semiotic artfacts/

material resources for tourism guidebooks, brochures, t-shirts, etc. They conclude that, although the post-Soviet era façades reflect the commodified local identity, they also depict the materialities of both pre- and post-Soviet façades. Through notions of layering and referencing, they demonstrate that the very act of ‘renovation’ is counterbalanced by ideals of preservation of the ‘original’ appearance.

The last chapter is contributed by Ella Chmielewska who looks at the visual sphere, that is, the material objects of semiosis to highlight the potential of close reading of discreet place-scapes as a way of emphasising the challenges of placing visual material in positions traditionally reserved for written language. She jettisons multimodality and opts for a wider socio-cultural theory to show that the semiotic materials in place are the resources for the consumption and production of cityspace, both of which require subjective ‘reading’ and appreciation of meanings.

The volume is generally well edited with chapters neatly flowing into each other. As indicated earlier, Jaworski and Thurlow are the first to acknowledge that most of the chapters in the volume do not adhere to the methodologies and analytical/theoreotical ethos being propulgated by the editors. In essence, they also follow the path of LL studies that they criticise. Another area of concern is that the chapters are mostly about urban areas, which means vast amounts of rural and countryside are left out. These concerns are also raised in a recent special issue of linguistic/semiotic landscapes of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, edited by Zabrodskaja and Milani (2014). Zabrodskaja and Milani (2014) note that despite researchers such as Stroud and Mpendukana (2009, 2010), Blommaert and Huang (2010), Shohamy and Gorter (2009), Pennycook

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(2009, 2010) and Jaworski and Thurlow (2010) to name a few, who have all suggested an ‘expansion of the scenery’ this is slow to happen. Recent work on linguistic/semiotic landscape studies has been moving in circles, shifting from qualitative analysis and right back to quantitative analysis. Thus, studies have continued focusing on written language (sometimes exclusively) rather than in conjuction with other semiotic landscapes and people’s experiences and interactions in these spaces.

The volume is an excellent contribution, whether one chooses to go the traditional route of LL studies with its focus on surveys and questionnaire data and/or the more recent material ethnographies and semiotic landscape route.

REFERENCESAdam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow.

2010. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London and New York: Continuum.

Ben Rafael, Elena Shohamy, Muhammad Hassan Amara and Nira Trumper-Hecht. 2006. Linguistic landscape as symbolic construction of the public space: The case of Israel. In Durk Gorter (ed.) Linguistic landscape: A new approach to multilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 7-30.

Blommaert, Jan and April Huang. 2010. Semiotic and spatial scope: Towards a materialist semiotics. Working papers in urban language & literacies 62. Tilburg: Tilburg University.

Bolter, J. David and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cannadine, David. 2000. Class in Britain. London: Penguin.

Cenoz, Jasone and Durk Gorter. 2006. Linguistic landscape and minority languages. International Journal of Multilingualism 3: 67-80.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.

Landry, Rodrigue and Richard Y. Bourhis. 1997. Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16 (1): 23-49.

Pennycook, Alistair. 2009. Linguistic landscapes and transgressive Semiotics of graffiti. In Shohamy, Elana & Durk Gorter (eds.). Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. New York: Routledge. 302–312.

Pennycook, Alistair. 2010. Spatial narrations. In Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow (eds.). Semiotic landscapes: Language, image, space. London: Continuum. 137–150.

Prior, Paul and Julie Hengst. 2010. Introduction. Exploring semiotic remediation as discourse practice. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Scollon, Ron and Suzanne Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourse in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge.

Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and memory. New York: Alfred Knof.

Shohamy, Elena and Durk Gorter (eds.). 2009. Introduction. Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery. New York: Routledge.

Stroud, Christopher and Sibonile Mpendukana. 2009. Towards a material ethnography of linguistic landscape: Multilingualism, mobility and space in a South African township. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13 (3): 363-386.

Stroud, Christopher and Sibonile Mpendukana. 2010. Multilingual signage: A multimodal approach to discourse of consumption in a South African township. Social Semiotics 20 (5): 469-493.

Zabrodskaja, Anastassia and Tommaso M. Milani. 2014. Signs in context: Multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space. Journal of Sociolinguistics 228: 1–6.

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